The history of pizza begins in antiquity, as various ancient cultures produced basic flatbreads with several toppings. Pizza is the world’s favorite fast food. We eat it everywhere – at home, in restaurants, on street corners. Some three billion pizzas are sold yearly in the United States, an average of 46 slices per person. But the story of how the humble pizza came to enjoy such global dominance reveals much about the history of migration, economics, and technological change.
People have been eating pizza, in one form or another, for centuries. As far back as antiquity, pieces of flatbread, topped with savories, served as a simple and tasty meal for those who could not afford plates or were on the go. These early pizzas appear in Virgil’s Aeneid. Shortly after arriving in Latium, Aeneas and his crew sat down beneath a tree and laid out ‘thin wheaten cakes as platters for their meal’. They then scattered them with mushrooms and herbs they had found in the woods and guzzled them down, crust and all, prompting Aeneas’ son Ascanius to exclaim: “Look! We’ve even eaten our plates!”
