Pizza: a slice of migration history

Pizza - possibly one of the most popular, tasty and simple things you can have for dinner tonight. But behind its simplicity lies a much more complex history - this is the tale of the Margherita's migration.

Take ingredients from Naples

Pizza has been around in Italy for more than 1,000 years in differing forms. What we recognise today as pizza was popularised in Naples. This dish began to conquer the world in the 19th century.

The 'Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana' ('True Neapolitan Pizza Association'), which was founded in 1984, sets the very specific rules that must be followed for an authentic Neapolitan pizza. For example, many Naples pizzerias will only use San Marzano tomatoes grown on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. This video shows Neapolitans living and working in Milan in the 1960s, with some working in the pizza industry.

Today, however, you don't need to be in Naples, or even Italy, to get your hands on a great pizza. In many ways, this is due to movement and migration.

Roll the dough across the seas

A number of factors led to a rise in the popularity of pizza around the world.

Large numbers of Italians migrated to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, bringing with them their local food traditions which were enjoyed mainly by Italian and Italian-American communities.

What would those original migrants think to the now-iconic New York-style pizza, cut into huge slices with extra thin crusts that you fold in half to eat?

Pizza's popularity boomed in the years after World War II.

Allied troops stationed in Italy during the war ate and enjoyed pizza, bringing their taste for the dish home to their countries. During the 1950s and 1960s, increased prosperity and leisure times led to populations from other Western European countries holidaying in Italy, discovering the delicious dish and creating an appetite back home for it.

Add toppings to taste

In these decades too, many Italians moved to Germany, Sweden, Netherlands and other Western European countries as guest workers, and later established their own restaurants.

These photographs of pizzerias in Swedish towns in Örebro County all have names associated with Italy: Pizzeria Italia, Pizzeria Roma, Pizzeria Verona, Pizzeria Mona Lisa and Pizzeria Colosseo.

Like the good ingredients of a pizza, all these factors combined to bring pizza to the world. In the collections gathered in Europeana.eu, we see evidence of pizza's popularity.

Local food traditions in individual countries now combine with the original Italian pizza recipes.

Japanese people enjoy pizza with squid and Tabasco. Banana toppings are popular in Iceland and Sweden. Hungarian pizzas, promoted in the leaflet above, boast sausage, smoked knuckles, beans, leek and mustard-sour cream sauce.

In Sweden, one of the most popular dishes - now considered a Swedish tradition - is kebabpizza. It combines pizza, 'brought' to Sweden by Italian guest workers, with kebab, brought to Sweden by Turkish and Middle Eastern guest workers.

We can also see examples of the mixing of migrant communities' food traditions in the Netherlands: here are the gyros pizza and the tandoori chicken pizza.

Enjoy with a side of tradition

But, in some cases, the age-old Italian traditions still remain.

At the Roads of Remembrance and Identity - Migration Stories from Romania collection day in Sibiu, we heard from Gheorghi, a Bulgarian man who trained in Italy to be a pizzaiolo and now owns a pizzeria in Romania:

My strong wish is to carry on the tradition of making good and healthy food, to preserve the old pizza recipes, innovating at the same time. I have brought with me from Italy four traditional pizza peels and even some high quality oven plates made from refractory materials from the Vesuvius Area.

So the next time you tuck into a pizza, think about the ingredients and where these have come from, and the communities who have migrated around the world and helped this dish from a city in the south of Italy become a world favourite.

This blog post is a part of the Migration in the Arts and Sciences project, which explored how migration has shaped the arts, science and history of Europe.