The first—absolute first—part of Italy’s cuisine to tackle in your exploration of Italian cuisine is pizza. This food item is all but archetypal. The evolution of pizza once tomatoes landed in Italy created a radius around the center of origin where a plethora of exquisite variations live and thrive. As a result, every beautiful region of Italy has its own characteristic style.
Campania
Campania is home to Naples, and in turn home to pizza napolitana. This is the paragon of pizza, used as a metric for pizzamakers everywhere. Neapolitan style pizza has a soft, thin, bubbly crust with a thickish edge for holding. It is prepared in wood-fired ovens at very high temperatures. Pizzaiolos (“pizzamakers” in Italian) all over the city of Naples toss this dough in multiple sizes and flavors–pizza Marinara (just tomato sauce) and Margherita (tomato sauce and mozzarella) toppings being the most common.
Lazio
The province of Lazio contains the bustling capital city of Rome, a truly global where pizza is available in more iterations that you can imagine. However, there are a few Roman specialties when it comes to pies: for starters, there’s pizza romana, the jumbo-sized crunchy thin pizza with almost no edge. The dough is flattened with a rolling pin and baked for a longer period of time in an electric oven. There’s also pizza al taglio, Rome’s by-the-slice street food. It’s a focaccia-like rectangular creation sold by weight in delicious varities such as rossa (just tomato sauce) and con le patate (cheese and believe it or not, potato!).
Liguria
Located on the Western coast of Italy just above Tuscany, Liguria is home to the city of Genoa. In pre-Columbian times—before the tomato even arrived in Italy—the people of Liguria enjoyed a fabulously soft flatbread pie similar to focaccia called pissa d'Andrea. This is a golden-crusted, milk-containing dough featuring onions, fresh anchovies, black taggiasca olives, lucious olive oil, and sea salt. Liguria is also where green pesto was born, which makes an appearance on this delicate style of pizza with some frequency.
Lombardy
This is where the high-fashion city of Milan is. Considering its elegant aura, you may be a bit taken aback that it is also the birthplace of something called panzerotti. Essentially, these are mini pizza pockets, full of tomato sauce, cheese, and sometimes meat. It resembles a calzone, but it is more like a fried turnover and less like a baked empanada. We can say that they are not very glamorous, but certainly very chic—it’s very hip street food.
Sicily
This small island region is exploding with great food. In this region alone there are three types of pizza that should be highlighted. First, there’s pizza siciliana, with airy dough over an inch thick and a crunchy bottom layer. Catania, on the east side of the island, boasts the deeply satisfying schiacciata, an egg-washed pie consisting of two thin layers of dough encasing anchovies, fresh cheese, and other delights such as potatoes, sausages, broccoli. Another variety is pizzolu from the area around Syracuse, south of Catania but also in the East. It is a round turnover, and stuffed with prosciutto, cheese, and fresh vegetables and quickly wood-fired.
Puglia
The heel of Italy, Puglia, features the rustic pizza pugliese. This thick-base pizza is full of flavor from its long, slow rise in the refrigerator overnight. Red onion and tomatoes are the most beloved topping. Provolone or pecorino cheeses are also commonly spotted atop pizza pugliese, along with olives, oregano, anchovies, and those delicious, mysterious salty morsels: capers.
Veneto
Magical Venice is home to many great works of art. Among them is the pizza gourmet, on the frontlines of Italy’s culinary exploration. Also known as tasting pizza, it’s served in small slices that are each individually decorated. This type of pizza is the perfect medium for the creativity of the chef or pizzaiolo. Although this form of pizza originated in Venice, it can be found all over Italy.
