Want to have the best food in Italy? Here's a three-minute guide to pizza heaven
From Naples to Rome, we have the lowdown on the best pizzerias.
We manage to score a table at L'Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba. Beneath the Porta delle Sciuscelle gate in Naples, the pizzeria, which opened in 1738, is said to be the world's oldest. Earlier, we'd walked past the second oldest, Da Michele, where a chaotic crowd milled about, waiting for a numbered paper ticket or the call that would grant them entry. Since featuring in the book (and movie) Eat, Pray, Love, L'Antica Pizzeria Da Michele has become a place of pilgrimage for Elizabeth Gilbert acolytes and social media influencers.
Really, where you go is irrelevant, because it's practically impossible to get a bad pizza in Naples. While beyond Italy's borders, the pizza may have morphed somewhat in its travels with the Italian diaspora, only the authentic version is recognised by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. Regulations include the amount of time the dough is fermented, the cooking temperature, the aesthetics of the crust, and even its size (no larger than 35cm).
But this is Naples, a place where rules are merely suggestions. Thus, the chewy-crusted version happily coexists with others: the portafoglio, the "wallet pizza", a folded pizza designed in the 1800s for the working class to eat on the go, and a more recent variant, the pizza fritta. These cloud-soft, deep-fried pizzas were created after World War II, when wood-fired ovens became expensive, and are sold at friggitorie, hole-in-the-wall fry shops. In Rome, we eat a different type of pizza altogether - lighter, with a crisp rather than chewy crust. Then there's pinsa - oval in shape, made using a mix of flours. Sold by the slice, cut from huge rectangular sheets, is Pizza al taglio.
Typically, Italians go out for pizza in the evening, but one jet-lagged early morning, we join the market stallholders at Forno Campo de Fiori bakery, queuing for a brown paper package of just-baked breakfast pizza - a focaccia-like base smeared with tomato sauce and a drizzle of olive oil.
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