Why do they call it a Margherita Pizza? How was it invented? What’s the origin of the most famous pizza of all?
If you’ve ever asked yourself any of these questions, you’re in the right place. And if you think you know the answers, hold on to your seat: because everything you think you know about the name of Margherita pizza is wrong.
You’ve probably been told that Margherita pizza was named after the Savoy queen. Or you’re among the wise people who know this is only a legend. But you’ll be surprised to learn more: we didn’t have any pizza known by that name until not so very long ago.
Curious? Well, let’s start from the beginning.
The legend of Margherita pizza
How was Margherita pizza invented, in reality?
It wasn’t called Margherita until the 60s
The legend of Margherita Pizza
The “history” sets the birth date of Margherita pizza as June 11, 1889. We are at the beginning of the newly born Italian kingdom: the unification of Italy happened in 1861, and the country was under one monarchy, ruled by the House of Savoy. King Umberto I and Queen Margherita were visiting Naples, once the proud capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. They had been there before, but they needed to show themselves more to be accepted as new rulers by the people.
Queen Margherita decided it was time to taste the local food so much loved by the Neapolitans: pizza. But they certainly couldn’t go to a pizzeria as ordinary people would. So they decided to have someone come to the palace to cook for them. Pretty easy: they were staying at the Royal Palace of Capodimonte, and the place was already equipped with a wood-fired oven. It had been installed almost a century earlier by the former king of Naples, Ferdinand IV, who was so in love with pizza that he wanted to eat it whenever he wished.
The “pizzajuolo” (pizza maker) invited to the palace by the Savoy monarchs was Raffaele Esposito. He was already quite famous in Naples, thanks to the fact that he had bought a popular pizzeria known as “Pietro… e basta così” located in Salita Sant’Anna di Palazzo (a street in the Chiaia neighborhood). But Esposito was even smarter: he had previously changed the name of his pizzeria to “Regina d’Italia” (The Queen of Italy), as if he knew that moment would come.
Esposito went to the palace with his wife, Maria Giovanna Brandi. He cooked his pizzas in the old Capodimonte oven (by the way: still perfectly working today). He prepared three pizzas. The first with oil, cheese, and basil: the pizza we know as Mastunicola. The second with “cecenielli” (the Neapolitan name for bianchetti, the whitebait of certain Mediterranean fish). And the third with tomato sauce and mozzarella, to which his wife Maria Giovanna decided to add a fresh basil leaf.
The queen tried all three. She was particularly pleased by the last one, also struck by the fact that the red of the tomato sauce, the white of the mozzarella, and the green of the basil reminded her of the Italian flag. So, after tasting it and finding it very good, she asked Esposito, “What is the name of this pizza?” And Esposito, with a stroke of genius, called it “Margherita.”
This homage made the queen very happy. The next day, Esposito received a thank-you letter from Camillo Galli, the great chamberlain of the palace. The fame of the pizzaiolo grew even more, and now everyone wanted to taste this pizza so loved by Queen Margherita. And that’s how Margherita pizza was invented and became so famous.
Or so the legend goes…
How was Margherita pizza invented, in reality?
The famous recipe presented to the queen was nothing new in Naples. We have written proof that a pizza with tomato sauce, mozzarella, and basil was already a staple in the city’s pizzerias. It is, in fact, described in the 1853 book by Francesco De Bourcard, Usi e Costumi di Napoli e contorni descritti e dipinti (Customs and Habits of Naples Described and Depicted). There is a whole chapter called “Il pizzajolo” that gives a detailed depiction of the pizza maker’s work and the ingredients used. Among them, tomato sauces and slices of mozzarella were already listed as a pair. But this prototype of the famous Margherita was just a pizza like any other, not so popular.
But do we know when Margherita pizza was invented? Let’s look at the set of norms and rules approved by the European Union for listing Neapolitan pizza as a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed. This set was written by AVPN (the Association for True Neapolitan Pizza) and it clearly states that “the Margherita pizza was invented between 1796–1810 and was then offered in 1889 to the Queen of Italy.”
So I asked myself: why that range of dates? And I posed the question to the president of the association, Mr. Antonio Pace. He told me they found a watercolor painting from that period depicting a scene from Naples, and the Margherita pizza was in it. He said it was sold at an auction at Sotheby’s, but couldn’t give me any more details, nor could I find any online. But again, there’s no evidence of the fame of that pizza or its name.
So we should thank Raffaele Esposito for offering it to Queen Margherita and popularizing it with that clever marketing strategy of naming the pizza after her, right?
Wrong. Because it seems that this “historical” episode never really occurred.
Thanks to Scott Wiener’s blog, I found a long, well-documented article by American food historian Zachary Novak that debunks the whole story of the pizzaiolo summoned to the palace. He looks at that very same letter as the main proof. Yes, because the thank-you letter allegedly sent from the Royal Palace is still proudly hanging on the wall, framed, in the pizzeria once owned by Esposito. That pizzeria is known today simply as Brandi: it was bought at the beginning of the 20th century by Maria Giovanna’s nephews.
Novak checked the archives of the Royal Palace and found no evidence of a letter sent by Camillo Galli that day, let alone to a pizzaiolo named Raffaele Esposito on any other day. Also, looking at that letter, he noted something: it was handwritten, header included, and the royal seal was applied with a rubber stamp.
However, the royal family had their own letterheaded stationery with a printed seal. Novak compared it to another letter sent by Camillo Galli from the Royal Palace of Milan, and he noted two things. First, the printed seal and the rubber stamp seal were quite different. Second, the handwriting was not the same.
Could it be that the famous letter was forged? The journalist had a theory: it could have been a marketing move by the pizzeria’s owners, who were suffering from the crisis and competition from other, more popular restaurants (like Pizzeria Port’Alba, quite famous in the 1930s). They made up the whole episode – and the letter – to tie their brand to the success story of their aunt’s husband and the invention of Margherita pizza.
Fascinating theory, but let me point out a flaw: if you read the letter, there’s no mention of a Margherita pizza. It only says, “I confirm that Her Majesty found your three pizzas to be very good,” without specifying the types of ingredients. Why forge a letter meant to be undeniable proof of the invention of Margherita pizza if you don’t name it in that letter?
Still, in 1989 a plaque was unveiled outside the pizzeria: “Here 100 years ago the Margherita pizza was born,” it reads. That statement is doubly false, as we know it existed before, and even if it was invented by Esposito, that happened at the Royal Palace of Capodimonte, not at the pizzeria.
Alright, but do we know how the Margherita pizza got that name, then?
No one called it Margherita until the 1960s
You read that right. But let me clarify. A pizza with tomato sauce, mozzarella, and basil leaves was already a thing by at least the end of the 18th century. But it had no name until more recent times. Actually, no pizza had a name.
I spoke to another food historian, Tommaso Esposito, and he told me something interesting: until after World War II, pizzerias had no menus at all. When you wanted a pizza, all you had to do was go to the counter, tell the pizza maker which toppings you wanted, and then wait for your order at the table.
Esposito wrote an interesting book called ‘A Pizza, viaggio nella canzone napoletana (Pizza, a Journey Through Neapolitan Songs), where he collected lyrics of songs about pizza from the 16th century until 1966 (the year of the famous song “‘A pizza” by Giorgio Gaber and Aurelio Fierro). Not one song had a pizza name, and only a few mentioned some ingredients.
Looking back at other historical books, pizza was always mentioned as a traditional specialty from Naples: but they always described the most common ingredients used, never any particular combination with a name. One notable example is the Gastronomic Guide of Italy issued by the Italian Touring Club in 1931. That was still during the Savoy domination: if any pizza called Margherita really existed in Naples, Esposito says, why would writers working for a national cultural institute not take the chance to pay homage to the royal family by quoting the famous episode of the queen? And yet, it is quite a popular legend to report in travel guides today.
Antonio Pace himself told me that the very first pizza championship was organized in Naples in 1964, at the Mostra D’Oltremare expo space. And he remembers pizzaioli going around shouting and offering people a pizza with tomato and mozzarella, calling it “Margherita.”
The first recorded proof of a pizza with this name is in a documentary made by the national TV channel RAI in 1967 (and available on YouTube). You can see a Neapolitan reporter asking a pizzaiolo if the Margherita pizza was the one with “an egg in the middle.” To which the pizzaiolo responds, “No, the Margherita I was taught is simply with tomato sauce, mozzarella, cheese, and basil.” That shows that it was probably called Margherita even before the ’60s, but there was still confusion about which pizza was associated with that name. It is hard to believe that a journalist from Naples wouldn’t know what a Margherita pizza was if it were such a long-established classic.
There’s more: the pizzaiolo actually says, “There is indeed a pizza with egg, but it is not called Margherita anymore.” Thus implying the Margherita we know today is different from the one they knew in the past. There is, in fact, another theory that says the name Margherita comes from the daisy flower: the cooked yolk placed in the middle reminds one of the pollen, the fiordilatte was laid in slices around like white petals, and the fresh basil was the leaves of the flower. The menu below is apparently from 1944, from Pizzeria Da Attilio on Pignasecca street: the Margherita pizza is not at the top of the menu like it is today. Probably, it was not that popular at the time, and it was even different.
We even have an older video of a pizza, in a scene from the movie San Giovanni Decollato (St. John the Beheaded), starring one of the most popular Italian actors ever, Totò. Antonio De Curtis, his real name, was from Naples, and his movies were always set in his hometown (although shot mainly in Rome). In this movie from 1940, he is served a pizza at a table: when serving it, the pizza maker simply says “your pizza,” not calling it by name as they would today. Of course, being a movie, this proves nothing: it was in fact shot on the Cinecittà stages in Rome, and the pizza was probably a prop, made multiple times for several takes. The oven itself was probably not real, just like the pizzaiolo, who was performed by an actor. But the overall scene may say something about the customs of that time.
The end of the story? Until new evidence is found, we can’t really say who invented the Margherita pizza. We don’t know why, when, or how it was named, nor its real origins. But we know one thing for sure: it is the best invention ever made by the Neapolitan people.
(An Italian version of this article was originally published on Storie di Napoli)
