Naples part III: Pizza!

Aight, people! I am home again and ready to blog about my recently spent ten day journey around Naples, Italy. As you will remember I reached Naples in the very early morning of Friday, Dec 24 after a brush with death on the plane down from Munich.

I still got up reasonably early and went to feast on that most hyped of Neapolitan specialities: the pizza. I am happy to report that the pizza in Naples is, indeed, the best in Italy (though that is not necessarily saying much). I went into a restaurant and, this being Naples, of course absolutely nobody spoke a word of English. By hand signals and grunting I managed to convey my desire to sit at a table and I even managed to speak Italian sufficiently to order a pizza with ham, salami and cheese. (Prosciutto, salami and formaggio if you wonder).

The whole business of making the pizza was quite interesting. There were a couple of guys standing at a counter, picking up little pieces of dough which they expertly rolled into very thin, vaguely pizza-shaped objects, which they then sprinkled with various goodies according to order. A third guy was wielding an oven spade like nobody's business, transporting the pizzas in and out of a huge stone oven standing in the corner. A fourth guy, a young Asian-looking kid served as the waiter, and he had to run around balancing things on trays, taking order and payments and generally working his ass off.

You could literally see every step of the pizza-making process. There was a lot of noise, mostly from the conversation, which in typical Italian style was conducted at upwards of 100 decibels. Customers and friends (I assume) of the establishment were dropping by all the time and the general spirits were high.

I also managed to catch a glimpse of the earlier stages of the process, as through an open back door I spotted an old woman making a fresh batch of tomato sauce - dumping various ingredients into a huge bucket and churning it around - all the while smoking like a chimney. Fortunately I'd already eaten most of my pizza and I can't say it tasted like ashes...

I doubt if a single part of the whole operation, from sauce making to cooking would have been approved by the health board here in Norway, but by Jove, the pizza was excellent!

A Neapolitan pizza - I don't know if this was a tourist thing or if their pizzas generally have more stuff on them than in other parts of Italy. They're wafer thin, so I had no problems consuming a whole one.


The hand that stirs the sauce...


The oven in which the pizzas were cooked.