Savor the pizza in Florence Italy!

Any trip to Italy is just as much about the food as it is about seeing Renaissance masterpieces by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo the true poster children for the “Renaissance man”.

Painters, sculptures, inventors – these guys could do it all and still have time for a pizza at the end of the day.  Of course is also the ancient rubble left by the Romans, discarded, looted, recycled and buried under centuries of trash.

Roman statues with missing arms and noses.  And renaissance era copies of said statues which were in fact mainly copies of the Greek statues that came before anyway.  Classical wonders through the ages, centuries and mood swings of the art patrons, all best viewed on a full stomach of great pizza.

 

The history of pizza begins in antiquity, when various ancient cultures produced flatbreads with toppings.

The precursor of pizza was probably the focaccia, a flat bread known to the Romans as panis focacius,^[1] to which toppings were then added.^[2] Modern pizza developed in Naples, when tomato was added to the focaccia in the late 18th century.

REMEMBER:  NO PIZZA BEFORE 9PM

One rule in Italy is no pizza for lunch.  Pizza in Italy is a social event and it is best eaten piping hot right out of the oven (preferably wood set and reaching  485º C) by a real chef preferably from Naples.

It takes a long time to get that wood fired pizza oven up to optimal temperature so thus, pizza as a late night snack, never for lunch.

“Mangiare la pizza prima delle nove mi fa tristeza”  “To eat pizza before 9 pm makes me sad.”

This is such a different concept than pizza in America where too often we stuff ourselves with terrible take out pizza, or school lunch pizza (think prison food) or those terrible excuses for pizza the frozen card board variety found in the freezer section at the supermarket.