Naples may not be the real birthplace of pizza but they know how to do it right. No slicing, no fancy toppings, no textured cheese. The rest of us can only drool

Ihave been going to Italy — which I love — for longer than many readers of Brunch have been alive. And yet, somehow I had never been to Naples, one of Italy’s most famous cities. When I finally did go, last week, I didn’t go because of Naples’ beauty or because I wanted to see Mount Vesuvius. I went for the most mundane of reasons.

I went for the pizza.

Yes, really. Even if Naples was birthplace of pizza, there are now so many different kinds. Even in Italy, the Roman style of pizza is well-respected and Americans will claim, with some justification, that the pizza that most of the world knows well was invented in New York and other American cities and not in Italy.

All this is probably true. But there really is no substitute for the pizza of Naples. So I went on a pizza pilgrimage last week. And I ate so much pizza that it got to the stage that by the end of the trip I couldn’t face another pizza. Here’s what I learned.

First, pizza in Naples is nothing like the pizzas you get delivered from Pizza Hut or Domino’s. It is not even like the Neapolitan pizzas you get in restaurants around the world.

Most of the pizzas I ate in Naples were relatively simple affairs. They were large, typically, around the size of a dinner plate, but not sharing-pizza large. They didn’t usually come pre-sliced so you had to cut them yourself. You could eat them with a knife and fork but then you could, I guess, eat even a paratha with a knife and fork. All the locals ate them with their fingers, sometimes with each slice folded up to four times. (The quadruple fold is a thing here.)

Americans like the term ‘pizza pie’ because their pizzas are really large pies, prized for their toppings. In Naples, pizza is not a pie. It is rarely judged by the toppings which, when they exist, are sparse and hardly predominating. Instead, it is the quality of the basic ingredients: Dough, tomatoes, cheese, buffalo mozzarella, etc.

A pizza in Naples goes into a very hot oven, after having been formed by hand (no rolling pins and flinging in the air as in America) and is baked for just one minute (or 90 seconds, at most) at around 500° c (between 850 to 910° F). Once it is out of the oven, it begins to deteriorate and must be consumed within ten minutes. Unlike American pizzas which are made for home delivery, this is less a pie and more like a soufflé.

You can, of course, put toppings into your pizza but there are two classic varieties. Margherita, long claimed to be the original, which is basically tomatoes and mozzarella; and Marinara which has no cheese. Some famous pizzerias in Naples will only serve these two basic pizzas. And even at places where other varieties are available, these will usually be among the two most popular varieties.

There are many ways in which a pizza in Naples differs from what we think of as a pizza. Here are two of them: in Naples, a pizza must have raised edges which must be blistered by the heat of the oven and most times (with a marinara, especially) the centre will still be moist or soupy from the tomato sauce even when the pizza comes to the table.

There are many styles of pizza in America because, even though Italian immigrants from the South (between 13 to 15 million Italians went to the US at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th) introduced pizza to America, the dish had no standard recipe in Naples when they left. So they carried different versions of the pizza with them and then improvised. Italians don’t usually think much of the improvisations. For instance, most Italians turn their noses up at Chicago’s Deep Pan pizza.

In return, Americans argue that pizzas in Naples can be boringly similar because the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana regulates