What does Italy have to do with pizza?
There are some foods that become so popular, so universal, that any ties they had with their native country are as tangled as a bowl of Spaghetti Bolognese. Italy seems to have more than its share of these types of dishes: veal parmesan, spaghetti and meatballs, Italian salad dressing, a meatball hero sandwich smothered in a red sauce with some sort of melted cheese-like substance. Nope. Nope. And Nope. You won’t find any of that in Italy.
Parmigiano Reggiano cheese comes from the Emilia-Romagna region of central Italy. Parmesan cheese in a can is to Parmigiano Reggiano what sparkling wine is to champagne. The red sauce that people associate with Italy comes from the South, probably around Naples, and it’s too hot there to keep an aged cheese like Parmigiano, so you would only use a fresh cheese like mozzarella. See, it gets complicated.
You could have tagliatelle pasta with a Bolognese sauce because tagliatelle is a fresh pasta made with eggs and the tender wheat found in central and northern Italy. Dried spaghetti is made with hard wheat and comes from the south, so there goes Spaghetti Bolognese.
A meatball is a "polpetta" and is served as a separate course, never on top of spaghetti.
Pre-made salad dressing is a foreign concept in Italy. Here you get a bottle of good olive oil, some vinegar and you are invited to mix your own.
A meatball hero? Fuhgeddaboudit!
So, where does that leave pizza? The inhabitants of Naples (or Napoli) want to take full credit for pizza, but its roots as a seasoned flat bread extend far back into the shadows of history. A peasant staple, the flatbread became a lowly street food seasoned with herbs and olive oil. It's not until sometime in the mid-18th century that tomatoes became an accepted part of the Mediterranean diet and wound up on the flat bread being served to fisherman returning to shore with their catch. And that’s the reason a simple tomato sauce is called a marinara sauce.
Article comments
1 - Jon Sobel
I'm curious - why not order the house red? In my travels in other parts of Europe, the house red is usually a good bet... but I haven't been to Italy yet.