Pizza is a baked flatbread usually topped with tomato sauce, cheese, and other ingredients. It's believed to have been invented in Naples, a city in the Campania region of Italy, and was originally a dish for the city's working poor, who appreciated the inexpensive yet filling meal.
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Italy may be pizza's ancestral home, but it's not the only place where you can get a top-notch slice. This guide, compiled by a team of anonymous judges, ranks the 50 best pizzerias in the world, Italy, the US, and more, offering a bucket list for pizza-loving completists.
Americans ate 3 billion of those, leading to sales that reached $43.3B, according to industry analysts at Gitnux. They estimated that Americans eat an average of 46 slices per person that year.
Flatbreads were eaten by ancient Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks, but historians trace pizza—flatbread with toppings, including present-day staples like tomatoes, cheese, garlic, oregano, and oil—back to 18th-century Naples, where the food was loved by its working poor, who appreciated a cheap, tasty meal. Naples formally became a part of Italy in 1861.
The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana claims to protect the tradition of Naples' pizzamaking and has codified precise requirements for what constitutes a "Neapolitan pizza," specifying ingredients, preparation, fermentation, condiments, and more.
A team of archaeologists discovered a fresco from 79 CE featuring what appears to be a proto-pizza: a pita topped with fruit, spices, and other toppings. One archaeologist in the PBS documentary below calls it an "ancestor of modern pizza in the sense that it's a very simple, poor kind of food."
Two million Italians emigrated to Argentina between 1880 and 1920, many of them the poor who regularly ate pizza. In Argentina, they were pleased to find that mozzarella was plentiful, allowing them to make cheesier pies. By 1882, Italians owned 126 of the 198 bakeries in Buenos Aires, as well as the majority of shops selling butter, cheese, and pasta.
Filippo Milone established at least six pizzerias in New York, including one that would later be called Lombardi's, widely considered to be the city's (and the country's) first pizza establishment. Milone died in 1924, leaving no children to tell his story. Researcher Peter Regas unearthed a 1903 advertisement, pictured below, from an Italian-language New York newspaper.
The New York establishment opened in the early 1900s and was a cornerstone of Manhattan's SoHo. At one point, it was open 23 hours a day, allowing laborers of the predominantly Italian-American community to stop by for pies before or after work.
Pizzerias opened in cities throughout the 1920s and '30s, especially those with large Italian immigrant populations, but the cuisine didn't take off nationally until after World War II. Some credit that with American soldiers' exposure to the food while stationed in Italy; others point to the invention of the mass-produced gas-fired ovens, which made opening a pizzeria considerably easier. Below is a 1944 clip from the New York Times, the first time the paper mentioned pizza.
Pizza was invented in Naples, though it wasn't particularly popular outside the region. As it grew more popular elsewhere—and as more American and European tourists visiting Italy began asking for it—restaurants across Italy adopted the cuisine. It's something anthropologist Agehananda Bharati calls "the pizza effect."
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