Pizza has evolved from a ghetto staple to a global delicacy.

Tomatoes have only been used in Italian cuisine for about 300 years. It is unknown when ‘Napoletana,’ a pasta-and-tomato-sauce meal, became popular, but it is thought to have originated in Naples, Italy in the 18th century. In addition, the tomato sauce pizza was manufactured in Naples. The flat bread prepared in Naples gave rise to today’s pizza. The original shape of the pizza was a flat bread topped with garlic, fat, and salt, and was known as white pizza. Chefs began adding tomatoes to compete with macaroni topped with tomatoes on pizza sold by pasta vendors in Naples.

Carlo Collodi (1826–1890), the author of The Adventures of Pinocchio, defined pizza like follows: Pizza was once considered a poor man’s cuisine. Pizza was a weekday dinner for the poor, while macaroni was a special Sunday dish made with the money they had saved. Because the poor in Naples did not have access to cooking facilities, they purchased pizza from street sellers and ate it on the street. You may also satisfy your stomach with a little slice of pizza for a penny. For a long time, pizza was considered a poor man’s cuisine in southern Italy. Then, in 1889, something happened that would go down in pizza history as a legend.

In 1889, Umberto I, the united Kingdom of Italy’s second king, and his wife, Queen Margherita, paid a visit to Naples. The king and queen were sick of the aristocrats’ French cuisine at the time. The Queen asked Raphael Esposito, the chef at her pizzeria Brandy, to make several edible pizzas. The queen, in particular, enjoyed her pizza, which was topped with tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and basil. After her reign, the pizza was dubbed ‘Margherita’ pizza.

Pizza, on the other hand, has yet to become a national dish. Pizza extended throughout northern Italy after World War II, thanks to a huge movement of southern Italians to northern towns in the 1950s and 1960s. It was also spread by Italian immigrants to other European countries and the United States.

Even within Italy, the south was particularly poor, and southern Italians began migrating to the United States in the late 1800s to escape poverty. They resided in large-scale apartment complexes and worked as manufacturing workers in many locations in the northeastern United States. These immigrants had access to pizza restaurants, but the majority of them were unregistered. In the early 1930s, an Italian immigrant called Lombardy started a business in New York selling plain spaghetti and pizza, sparking the city’s pizza mania.

Soldiers returning to the United States after World War II, on the other hand, could not forget the flavor of the cuisine they had eaten in Italy, so they went to an Italian restaurant and even attempted to make pizza at home. Homemade pizza recipes became popular in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Deep dish pizza with a thicker crust and more toppings first appeared in Chicago in the mid-1940s, garnering popularity among both Italian and non-Italian customers. Finally, the first Pizza Hut debuted in Wichita, Kansas, in 1958, and the first Domino’s in Michigan opened in 1960. Pizza has become the preferred snack of Americans in their twenties by 1970. Pizza originated on a run-down neighborhood in Naples and has since grown to become one of America’s most popular foods, as well as a global favorite.