Pizza Margherita Period BOrigin theory DVerified

Where the Margherita actually came from

The Margherita is a Neapolitan pizza in three colors: red tomato, white mozzarella, and a few leaves of green basil on a thin round of dough, baked crisp and eaten hot in the street. The tomato at its heart reached Naples late. It crossed from the New World to Europe in the sixteenth century and was long kept at arm's length there as an ornament or a suspected poison, spreading as an everyday food in the city's kitchens only over the course of the eighteenth century.

The pizza we now call Margherita — tomato, mozzarella, and basil — took root in the streets of Naples over the course of the nineteenth century. Wood-fired ovens lined the corners, the habit of eating out grew, and pizzerias, shops devoted to the trade, began handing customers pizza straight from the oven. It was through this street life of the city that the dish settled in as everyday food for ordinary people.

Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Neapolitan emigrants carried this pizza across the sea to America. There it changed into a local style with thick dough and a generous load of cheese, and American pizza branched off as a separate line.

The familiar version goes like this. In 1889, when Queen Margherita visited Naples, the pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito is said to have made her a pizza in the three colors of the Italian flag — red tomato, white mozzarella, green basil — and to have named it in her honor.

The tale falls apart on its own timeline. More than two decades before the supposed royal presentation, Francesco De Bourcard's "Usi e costumi di Napoli" (Vol. II, 1866) already describes a Neapolitan pizza topped with mozzarella and basil. The form existed well before the name later pinned to it.

The single piece of physical evidence ever offered for the anecdote — a thank-you letter from the royal household — is dogged by doubts that will not go away. The study by Nowak ("Folklore, Fakelore, History," Food, Culture & Society, 2014), summarized by Scott's Pizza Tours, notes that the seal and the signature (Galli Camillo) do not line up, and that the purported sender's name, "Esposito Brandi," clashes with the dates. And the Geneva Gazette of 25 July 1880 had already reported the queen eating pizza in Naples — before Esposito's shop even opened in 1883. On the sequence of events alone, the 1889 naming cannot stand. National Geographic has carried these points to a wide readership.

So the dish itself — tomato, mozzarella, and basil on a Neapolitan pizza — was real and on the streets of Naples well before 1889. Where the name "Margherita" actually came from, the sources still do not say. The queen's anecdote has been set aside; the true origin of the name remains an open question.