What Is the History of Pizza? From Naples to Your Table

Where Pizza Really Began

Ask most people where pizza comes from and you’ll get one word: Italy.

The short answer is that Italy gave us pizza as we know it, but flatbreads with toppings are far older than that.

I’ve read enough food history to know almost every ancient culture had some version of flatbread topped with oil, herbs, or cheese.

Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all baked flat, round breads and dressed them with olive oil, herbs, and local cheeses.

The Greeks even had a word, plakous, for a flatbread topped with garlic and onion, which some historians point to as a distant ancestor.

None of these were pizza in the sense we mean today, though.

What was missing for centuries was the ingredient that defines pizza in most people’s minds: tomato sauce.

Tomatoes are native to the Americas, and they didn’t reach Europe until after the Columbian Exchange in the 1500s, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s entry on the tomato.

For a long time, Europeans actually thought tomatoes were poisonous, since they’re related to nightshade plants.

It took roughly two centuries before Italians, especially in the south, started using tomatoes in cooking regularly.

Naples: The Birthplace of Modern Pizza

Naples is where all these pieces finally came together.

By the late 1700s, Neapolitan street vendors were selling flatbreads topped with tomatoes, cheese, oil, and anchovies to the city’s working poor.

This was fast, cheap, portable food, sold from carts and small shops, not a fancy dish at all.

In fact, for a long time pizza was looked down on by wealthier Italians as food for the lower classes.

That started to change once pizza got a royal seal of approval.

The dish’s cultural importance is now recognized internationally: UNESCO added the Art of Neapolitan Pizzaiuolo to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2017.

If you’ve ever wondered why so many pizzerias still bake at extremely high heat in wood-fired ovens, this is the tradition they’re chasing.

I’ve found that once you’ve had real Neapolitan-style pizza, with its charred, blistered edges and soft center, it’s hard to go back to thick, cracker-crisp crusts.

Plenty of modern pizzerias still lean on garlic-forward flavors that echo those early Neapolitan flatbreads, and if you want to taste that yourself, this garlic pizza bread recipe is a good starting point.

The Margherita Story

The most famous pizza legend involves Queen Margherita of Savoy.

The story goes that in 1889, she asked Neapolitan pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito to create a pizza in her honor.

He supposedly topped it with tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil, echoing the red, white, and green of the Italian flag.

Historians debate how much of this story is true versus tourist-friendly legend, but the name stuck.

Margherita pizza remains the benchmark against which many pizzerias measure themselves today.

How Pizza Crossed the Atlantic

Pizza didn’t arrive in America as a novelty food, it arrived with people.

Between the 1880s and early 1900s, millions of Italians immigrated to the United States, many settling in cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston.

The Library of Congress’s overview of Italian immigration notes this wave brought southern Italian food traditions, including Neapolitan-style cooking, into densely packed urban neighborhoods.

In these neighborhoods, pizza was still mostly a food Italians made for other Italians.

Lombardi’s, which opened in New York City’s Little Italy in 1905, is widely credited as the first licensed pizzeria in the US.

Gennaro Lombardi had been selling pizza informally out of a grocery store for years before he got the license.

Over the next few decades, other Italian-American pizzerias opened in cities like New Haven and Trenton, each developing its own regional twist.

New Haven’s apizza, for example, is known for its thin, charred, oval crust, a style that’s stayed fiercely local ever since.

Pizza Goes Mainstream in America

For roughly the first half of the 20th century, pizza was still mostly an ethnic food, tied closely to Italian-American communities.

That changed after World War II.

American soldiers stationed in Italy during the war got their first real taste of pizza, and many came home craving it.

This shift in demand helped push pizza out of Italian neighborhoods and into the wider American food landscape.

By the 1950s and 60s, pizza chains started forming to meet that growing appetite.

Pizza Hut opened in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas, and Domino’s followed in 1960 in Michigan.

These chains standardized pizza, made it fast and affordable, and eventually built the delivery infrastructure that we now take for granted.

Pizza Hut later invented stuffed crust pizza in the 1990s, a format so popular there’s now a whole science to reheating it properly if you want the cheese-filled edge to stay gooey, not rubbery, which is covered in this guide on how to reheat stuffed crust pizza.

Domino’s, for its part, helped popularize the idea of pizza as a fast, on-demand meal, and if you’ve got cold leftovers from a recent order, there’s a right way to bring it back, detailed in this piece on how to reheat dominos pizza.

Regional Pizza Styles Across the US

One thing that trips people up is assuming pizza is just one thing.

In my experience, once you start traveling and eating pizza around the country, you realize just how many distinct regional styles exist.

Each city’s version reflects its own immigrant history, local ingredients, and oven technology.

Chicago’s deep-dish style, developed at Pizzeria Uno in the 1940s, flips the usual order, with cheese on the bottom and chunky tomato sauce on top.

Detroit-style pizza, baked in rectangular steel pans originally used in the auto industry, has a thick, crispy-bottomed crust with cheese pushed right to the edges.

St. Louis-style uses a cracker-thin crust and a distinctive processed cheese blend called Provel.

Whatever the style, most of these pizzas benefit from a good dipping sauce alongside the crust, and this list of dipping sauces for pizza is worth bookmarking if you want to switch things up.

Pizza in the Modern Era

Today, pizza is one of the most popular foods in the United States, and it’s genuinely a year-round, any-day meal for most households.

Frozen pizza, delivery apps, and national chains have made pizza more accessible than ever.

I’ve noticed that a lot of readers care less about pizza’s origin story and more about what to do with the extra slices sitting in the fridge.

That’s a fair concern, since reheated pizza can go rubbery or soggy if you don’t do it right.

The microwave is the fastest option, though it won’t give you a crisp crust, and this guide on how to microwave pizza walks through how to minimize the sogginess.

If your leftovers came from a specific chain, the reheating method can matter, since crust thickness and cheese blend vary a lot; there’s a dedicated guide for how to reheat papa johns pizza and another for how to reheat pizza hut leftovers.

It’s a small, practical detail, but it’s a good reminder of how far pizza has come, from a Neapolitan street food to a dish precise enough that people search for chain-specific reheating instructions.