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LoginA Brief History of Pizza, Popular Recipes, And How It Climbed The Social Ladder
9 min
06/06/20269 min06/06/2026
One of the world’s favourite fast foods today, pizza, was once considered disgusting in its place of origin, Naples. They were a symbol of poverty, associated with the ‘lazzaroni’ or the lower-class people who were dirt poor. This was around the 18th century, when European countries like Italy and Spain had an influx of workers, working in local places, be it farms or elsewhere. They needed calorific meals to sustain their hard labour, so they turned to bread, as the Spanish labourers did, and added whatever topping they could find.
The pizza from the streets was fairly simple with a smattering of olive oil, garlic and tomatoes. If someone had a little money, then fish, cheese or lard was added as a topping. Given their portable nature, it’s no surprise that pizza was a street food, looked down upon by food critics and locals during its earlier days.
Even local cookbooks, some of the first in Italy that came out in the 19th century, snubbed pizza of the honours. Back then, pizza was much smaller, with barely any choices and did not come sliced. You ate what you were given, and it disappeared in a flash, given its sole purpose was to give quick energy and make survival easier. But times have changed, and how, with pizza not only becoming popular but even going “artisanal”. Read ahead to know all about its history.
The origins of pizza go all the way back to prehistory, with some believing it began during the Neolithic period. In the Near East, when agriculture was still new, humans figured out that cooking a wet dough of roasted and ground cereals on a hot stone was a good way to get something tasty to eat.
It all starts with bread’s story, way before the history of pizza. In the ancient world, around 1350 B.C, bread was associated with the Egyptians, who used to brew beer and were known for making yeast bread. It’s hard to say if bread was made from the beer foam floating on top during beer making, or beer was made from the fermented leftovers of bread.
The Romans called their hearth-baked flatbread ‘panis focacius’ – a name that survives, barely changed, as the focaccia we eat today. A precursor of pizza was probably the focaccia, to which toppings were then added. Modern pizza evolved from similar flatbread dishes in Naples, Italy, between the 16th and mid-18th century.
The word ‘pizza’ first appeared in a 997 CE document from Gaeta, Italy, where a tenant was required to deliver twelve ‘pizze’ annually, likely referring to a simple bread or pie. Linguistically, it may derive from ‘pinza’, meaning ‘to clamp or press’, from the Latin pinsere, to pound or stamp, apt for how dough is shaped. By 1535, it was seen that focaccia in Naples was called pizza, helping formalise the term for a dish already eaten for centuries.
The modern birthplace of pizza is southwestern Italy's Campania region, home to the city of Naples. Founded around 600 BCE as a Greek settlement, Naples in the 1700s and early 1800s was a thriving waterfront city. Technically an independent kingdom, it was notorious for its throngs of the Neapolitan working poor, or lazzaroni.
These Neapolitans required inexpensive food that could be consumed quickly, kickstarting what would be the inception of the first echoes in the history of pizza. Pizza, which was a flatbread back then with various toppings, eaten for any meal and sold by street vendors or informal restaurants, met this need. Documents reveal that in 1835, they sustained exclusively on pizza in winter and watermelon in summer.
Pizza became a barometer of the economy, with marinara pizza prices rising when fish were scarce and falling when fish were plentiful. There was also a local pizza pricing scale, with fresh pizza costing more than day-old pizza and stale pizza available for even less. This was called Pizza al Otto, meaning you could pay for your stale pizza eight days later, which then became known as ‘the last supper’ if you died in the interim.
By 1807, there were 54 pizzerias registered in Naples, and within a few decades, the number had doubled. The world's first pizzeria, Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba (1738), was established in Naples as a stand for the tin stove vendors. A world treasure with its oven lined with lava rocks from Mount Vesuvius, it is still in operation today.
Tomatoes aren’t local to Europe; read about their history here. While tomatoes without pizzas are like summer without mangoes today, when they arrived in Europe from Peru, explorers thought they were poisonous. That is, until poor mariners and other tradesmen began topping their flatbread with the imported fruits.
The well-heeled of that time preferred to indulge in meats; fruits and vegetables were considered peasant food. It was precisely this class stigma that gave pizza the tomato. By the 1600s, tomato-topped pizza was firmly established in Naples, and vendors sold slices on the street.
From the chaos of Naples' street food culture emerged two foundational pizzas that still define the dish more than two centuries later.
Pizza Marinara is the older of the two. Pizza marinara took its name from the seafarers who ate this particular pizza, prepared by their wives when they returned home from fishing expeditions in the Bay of Naples. The seafarer's wife, la marinara, traditionally topped the pizza with tomato, oregano, garlic, and extra virgin olive oil. It contains no cheese and no fish, despite its name.
Pizza Margherita is said to have originated when King Umberto I and Queen Margherita visited Naples in 1889. The pair, bored with their diet of French haute cuisine, asked for an assortment of pizzas from the city's Pizzeria Brandi. A pizza was created by Raffaele Esposito for Queen Margherita of Savoy, topped with fresh tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil to mirror the Italian flag. It’s known by her namesake and as Neapolitan pizza today.
The history of pizza, from its journey starting with Naples to the United States of America, began with late 19th to early 20th-century Italian immigration. Neapolitans brought simple pizzas to cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, and others while working factory jobs. One of the earliest documented pizzerias was Lombardi’s in New York, licensed in 1905, which still operates today.
For decades, pizza remained largely an immigrant food until World War II, when American soldiers in Italy developed a taste for it and brought it home. Post-war economic growth, urbanisation, and fast-food culture then pushed pizza into the mainstream. By the mid-late 20th century, media, advertising, and cultural export turned pizza into a global food symbol.
Once America embraced pizza and then exported its own versions to the world, the dish began its most extraordinary transformation. In America alone, distinct regional pizza styles emerged with little resemblance to each other, let alone to the original Neapolitan:
New York-style pizza
Chicago deep-dish pizza
Detroit-style
Roman or pizza bianca
Pizza came to India much later than its global spread. It initially entered through urban exposure and growing interest in international food, not as a traditional import. Once it reached Indian cities, it quickly found a place because India already had a strong culture of flatbreads, making it familiar in form.
By the time pizza became more widely available, especially from the late 20th century onward, it began adapting to local preferences. It became more spiced, loaded, and customised with Indian ingredients rather than staying Italian in style.
As global chains expanded, pizza shifted from a niche urban food to a mainstream comfort dish, and India’s version evolved further with fusion toppings and stronger flavours tailored to local taste buds. Here are some local favourites that come with Indian-style toppings like paneer, mushrooms and chicken:
Hand-tossed pizza
Thin-crust pizza
Cheese burst pizza
Pan-baked pizza
Stuffed-crust pizza
From Egyptian yeasted breads to pizza sold on the streets of Naples, pizza has come a long way, cherished by both the upper-class masses as well as the regular folks. The history of pizza is intriguing in that way, and with its countless baking styles, including the different crusts and toppings, there is one for everyone.
Modern pizza is widely credited to Naples, Italy, where Raffaele Esposito created the classic pizza Margherita in 1889 for Queen Margherita, though earlier flatbreads existed across Mediterranean cultures.
