15 Facts About Pizza: Naples, Hawaiian Pizza and the World’s Biggest Pie

Pizza is a flat bread baked with toppings, and in its modern form it comes from Naples in southern Italy. From cheap street food it has become one of the best-known dishes on Earth, with its own UNESCO listing, a space-age army ration and a Guinness World Record. Here are 15 facts about pizza.

1The word “pizza” was written down more than 1,000 years ago.

The oldest known use of the word is in a Latin document from Gaeta, a town between Rome and Naples, dated 997. It says a tenant owed the local bishop twelve pizzas, although these were probably quite different from the pizzas we eat today.

2Modern pizza began as cheap street food in Naples.

Naples was a crowded city with many poor workers, and pizza was a quick, low-cost meal sold in the street. In the late 19th century the writer Matilde Serao described it as “extremely cheap” food sold to the city’s poor.

3Europeans were once suspicious of tomatoes.

Tomatoes come from the Americas and reached Europe in the 16th century. They belong to the nightshade family, which includes some poisonous plants, so many Europeans were wary of eating them for a long time. The fruit itself is safe, and it eventually became the classic pizza topping.

4The famous story of the pizza Margherita may not be true.

The legend says that in 1889 the Naples pizza maker Raffaele Esposito made a tomato, mozzarella and basil pizza for Queen Margherita of Italy. Historians now doubt this: a pizza with the same three toppings was described in Naples in 1853, and the royal thank-you letter that backs up the story may be a forgery.

5Neapolitan pizza making is on a UNESCO heritage list.

In 2017 UNESCO added the “Art of Neapolitan Pizzaiuolo” to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. A pizzaiuolo is a pizza maker, and UNESCO says about 3,000 of them live and work in Naples.

6A true Neapolitan pizza follows strict rules.

The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, which protects the traditional style, says the pizza should be no wider than 35 cm. It is baked for just 60 to 90 seconds in an extremely hot oven, which gives the soft centre and puffy, charred edge.

7Pizza reached the United States with Italian immigrants.

Italian families brought pizza to American cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Lombardi’s in New York, said to date from 1905, is often called the first pizzeria in the US, but researchers have found evidence of pizza being sold in New York even earlier.

8Pizza boomed in America after the Second World War.

Soldiers who had served in Italy came home with a taste for it, and pizza spread far beyond Italian neighbourhoods in the late 1940s and 1950s. Chains followed: the first pizza franchise, Shakey’s, began in Sacramento, California, in 1954.

9Britain’s best-known pizza chain began in Soho in 1965.

Peter Boizot opened the first PizzaExpress on Wardour Street in London on 27 March 1965. That first branch stayed open for 55 years before it closed in 2020.

10Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada.

Sam Panopoulos, who was born in Greece in 1934 and moved to Canada in 1954, is widely credited with creating it at his Satellite restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, in the early 1960s. He called it “Hawaiian” after the brand of tinned pineapple he used.

11Pineapple on pizza was an experiment, not a mix-up.

A popular story says pineapple was grabbed by mistake instead of pepperoni. There is no evidence for this. Panopoulos had no formal pizza training and tried pineapple chunks on a pizza simply to see how they would taste.

12Pizza in Japan often has mayonnaise and potato on top.

Mayonnaise is a popular topping in Japan. Domino’s Japan’s “Mayo Jaga” pizza, for example, comes with sliced potato, sausage and mayonnaise.

13One of the first things ever ordered online was a pizza.

In 1994 Pizza Hut tested a service called PizzaNet in Santa Cruz, California, which let customers order pizza through a web page. It was not the first online purchase of all, but it was one of the earliest food orders made on the web.

14The US Army has a pizza that keeps for three years.

Army food scientists in Natick, Massachusetts, spent years creating a pepperoni pizza for ready-to-eat field rations. Like other ration meals, it has to stay safe and tasty for three years when stored at up to about 27°C (80°F), and it began going into ration packs in 2018.

15The world’s largest pizza covered almost 1,300 square metres.

Guinness World Records lists the largest pizza as 1,296.72 m² (about 13,958 sq ft), made by the YouTuber Airrack with Pizza Hut in Los Angeles on 19 January 2023. It used about 6,193 kg of dough, 3,992 kg of cheese and roughly 630,000 slices of pepperoni.

FAQs about pizza

Is pizza Italian?

Yes. Flatbreads with toppings are eaten in many countries, but the pizza we know today, with tomato and cheese, developed in Naples, Italy, before spreading around the world.

Where was Hawaiian pizza invented?

In Canada. Greek-born Sam Panopoulos is widely credited with putting tinned pineapple and ham on a pizza at his restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, in the early 1960s.

What is the biggest pizza ever made?

According to Guinness World Records, it measured 1,296.72 m² and was made in Los Angeles on 19 January 2023 by Airrack and Pizza Hut.

Sources and further reading

• UNESCO: Art of Neapolitan “Pizzaiuolo”
• National Geographic: Pizza Margherita may be fit for a queen, but was it really named after one?
• The Canadian Encyclopedia: Sam Panopoulos
• Guinness World Records: Largest pizza

Explore more: facts about Naples, facts about Italy and facts about cheese.

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