Italian food is full of origin stories, and a surprising number were invented long after the dishes themselves. These stories run from a Latin document of 997 that mentions pizza to a Minnesota couple who mortgaged everything to sell frozen pizza, by way of a Roman hill built from olive oil jars, a bank that takes cheese as collateral, and a trade magazine that handed Marco Polo credit he never earned.
Every tile in a Pizza, Pasta and Italian Food game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Pizza
nine stories
1The royal thank-you note that may be a fake
On the tile: Margherita1889Legend
The story goes that in 1889 Queen Margherita, visiting Naples, had the pizza maker Raffaele Esposito bake for her and loved a pie in the red, white and green of the Italian flag, so he named it after her. A thank-you letter from the royal household still hangs in the pizzeria. Historian Zachary Nowak found no trace of it in royal records, and it is addressed to "Raffaele Esposito Brandi," adding his wife's maiden name, which he would not have used. The name Pizza Margherita does not appear in any known document until the 1930s.
In 2023, archaeologists at Pompeii uncovered a wall painting of a flatbread on a silver platter beside a cup of wine, and headlines wondered whether it showed an ancient pizza. The site's experts said no. Tomatoes and mozzarella were not available to the Romans. The bread holds fruit, including a pomegranate and possibly dates, with spices or a kind of pesto. Experts think the still life shows gifts offered to guests, preserved when Vesuvius buried the town in AD 79.
The Hawaiian pizza owes Hawaii nothing but a label. Sam Panopoulos was born in Greece, moved to Canada at 20, and ran the Satellite restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, with his brothers. In 1962, experimenting with the menu, he put canned pineapple and ham on a pizza. He later told the BBC that a couple of months after they first passed it to customers, people were going crazy about it. He named it after the brand of canned pineapple he used.
4The oldest written pizzas were owed to the church
On the tile: Gaeta997
The oldest known written use of the word pizza is not from Naples. It appears in a Latin document from the year 997 in Gaeta, up the coast to the northwest. Tenants of a mill on the nearby Garigliano River owed the bishop of Gaeta twelve pizzas, duodecim pizze, and some pork every Christmas, and twelve more pizzas and two chickens every Easter. Nobody knows exactly what those pizzas were. The word then covered various baked goods, and the tomato would not reach Europe for more than 500 years.
Detroit-style pizza was born in 1946 at Buddy's Rendezvous, a bar on the city's east side, where owner Gus Guerra and his family adapted a Sicilian-style recipe with a thick, focaccia-like crust. They baked it in rectangular blue steel pans borrowed from local auto plants, where such pans had held nuts and bolts. Pepperoni and Wisconsin brick cheese went on first and the sauce on top, and the cheese caramelized into crisp corners. For decades it stayed a local dish. A longtime Buddy's executive says he never heard the term Detroit-style until a trade magazine used it in the 1980s.
6Chicago deep dish began with a lighter, cake-like crust
On the tile: Deep Dish1943
Chicago's deep-dish pizza began in December 1943, when Ric Riccardo opened a pizzeria in a former basement tavern at 29 East Ohio Street, the place later known as Pizzeria Uno. Pizza historian Peter Regas found what he believes is Riccardo's original dough recipe, published in 1945. It used scalded milk, butter and sugar, was baked in a pie pan or cake tin, and made a thinner, lighter, vaguely cake-like crust. Since then the pies have thickened: that recipe makes about an 8.25-ounce dough ball for a 9-inch pizza, while Uno's dough ball has grown to 14 ounces.
Rose and Jim Totino opened a takeout pizza shop in Minneapolis in 1951. Customers kept wanting to eat on the spot, so they added a card table, and the takeout became a restaurant. In January 1962 they started production at a frozen food plant, and by summer they had lost about $150,000. Then Jim found ready-made frozen pizza crusts at a Dallas convention, and they mortgaged everything to make frozen pizza with better sauce, meat and cheese. By mid-1963 it was a success. In 1975 Pillsbury bought the business for $22 million in stock and made Rose a vice president.
In 2001, Pizza Hut sent a pizza to the International Space Station. The 6-inch pie was vacuum-sealed and launched in March on a Russian supply rocket, and the station's commander, cosmonaut Yuri Usachov, ate it after it was warmed in a space oven. Salami replaced pepperoni because the pepperoni grew mold during a required 60-day test, and extra salt made up for taste buds dulled in space. The company reportedly paid about $1 million, which also put its logo on a Russian rocket.
9America's first pizzeria may have had another founder
On the tile: Lombardi's1905Legend
Lombardi's in New York has long been called America's first licensed pizzeria, opened by Gennaro Lombardi in 1905. No copy of that license has ever turned up. After ten years in the archives, researcher Peter Regas found that Lombardi first came to America in November 1904, at 17, listed as a laborer. A March 1905 newspaper ad shows the pizzeria at 53 1/2 Spring Street already run by Giovanni Santillo, who had followed an earlier baker, Filippo Milone. If Lombardi worked there in 1905, it was probably as an employee.
Marco Polo did not bring pasta home from China. Pasta was already being made in Sicily more than a century before he returned to Venice in 1295. The tale got its big push in 1929 from the Macaroni Journal, published by the association of American pasta makers. In its story, one of Polo's sailors, named Spaghetti, sees a woman on the coast of Cathay making long, thin strands of dough. The 1938 Gary Cooper film The Adventures of Marco Polo spread the tale further, serving the explorer a dish of "spa ghet" in China.
A few days after Christmas 1930, the poet Filippo Marinetti, founder of the Futurist art movement, published a Manifesto of Futurist Cooking in a Turin newspaper. He blamed spaghetti, macaroni and gnocchi for pessimism and laziness, and called for new foods made with the help of chemistry, poetry and music as ingredients, and meals without silverware. Italy kept its pasta. In 2014, New York's Guggenheim Museum revived a Futurist dinner, where 60 guests in textured pajamas ate a salad without forks.
Family lore says Roman restaurateur Alfredo di Lelio created his fettuccine with butter and Parmesan in 1908 to help his wife, Ines, regain her strength after the birth of their son. His tableside showmanship made the dish famous. Silent film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks ate at his Rome restaurant on their 1920 honeymoon, and in 1927 they came back with a gold fork and spoon engraved "To Alfredo the King of the noodles." The dish appears in more than 800 American cookbooks, yet many Italians have never heard of it.
Carbonara tastes ancient, but the first traces of a recipe date only to the 1940s, and nobody agrees on where it came from. Some tie it to charcoal burners in the Apennine mountains. Another story credits an Italian army cook who in 1944 made it for Allied officers from American bacon and powdered egg rations. La Cucina Italiana, one of the first magazines to print a recipe, published its version in August 1954. It called for pancetta, garlic and Gruyere, while today's purists insist on guanciale and frown on garlic.
Chef Boyardee was a real person. Hector Boiardi began cooking in Italy at 10, worked at the Ritz-Carlton in New York, and came to Cleveland as chef at the Hotel Winton, where his spaghetti dinners became the talk of the Midwest. He and his wife, Helen, opened a restaurant in 1924, and by 1928 their dine-in and carryout trade needed a factory. They renamed the brand to spell his name the way it sounds: Chef Boy-ar-dee. During World War II he developed field rations for the armed services.
Legend says that the goddess Venus once stayed at an inn in Castelfranco Emilia, between Bologna and Modena, and the innkeeper caught a glimpse of her through the keyhole. He rushed to the kitchen and shaped a pasta like her navel: the tortellino. The town still celebrates with a costumed parade. Food historian Luca Cesari traced the tale to 1908, when a Bolognese engineer named Giuseppe Ceri wrote it for a festival of friendship between Bologna and Modena. The first known tortellino recipe is far older, from 1570.
In Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, from the mid-1300s, a prankster named Maso fools the gullible painter Calandrino with tales of a land called Bengodi. There, he says, the vines are tied up with sausages, and on a mountain made entirely of grated Parmesan live people who do nothing but make macaroni and ravioli, boil them in capon broth and toss them down the slope for anyone to grab. Calandrino swallows every word. Nearly seven centuries later, the Parmigiano Reggiano cheesemakers' consortium still quotes the passage.
On April 16, 1972, Bologna's Chamber of Commerce registered an official recipe for the city's tagliatelle, and it set a width. A cooked strand should be 8 millimeters wide, about a third of an inch, which the recipe also expresses as the 12,270th part of the height of the city's Asinelli Tower. To settle any argument, a tagliatella made of gold shows the exact size at the Chamber of Commerce. The deed warns that any other size would cost the pasta its inimitable character.
In 1154, the Arab geographer al-Idrisi, working at the court of Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily, described the island town by town. At Trabia, near Palermo, he found plentiful water driving many mills, and estates making a string-shaped pasta called itriyya in such quantities that it was shipped to Calabria and to Muslim and Christian lands. More than eight centuries ago, pasta was already an export business in Sicily.
According to Parma's Tomato Museum, the documented history of the tomato in Italy begins on October 31, 1548, in Pisa. That day Cosimo de' Medici received a basket of tomatoes from his farm at Torre del Gallo near Florence, grown from seeds his wife had received from her father, the viceroy of Naples. The Spanish had brought the plant from the Americas, and at first Italians grew it mainly as an ornamental curiosity rather than as food. Its career in Italian cooking came much later.
Since 1953, Credem, a regional bank in northern Italy, has accepted wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano as collateral for loans to cheese producers. The logic is simple. The cheese ages 18 to 36 months before sale, tying up a producer's money for about two years, and it grows more valuable as it matures. The bank stores and ages the wheels in climate-controlled vaults for the length of the loan, saving producers the cost. In 2015 the arrangement became a Harvard Business School case study.
Monte Testaccio in Rome is an artificial hill rising about 35 meters, or 115 feet, above the streets around it and roughly a kilometer around, built from broken amphorae, the clay jars that carried goods into the city. Most are olive oil jars from Baetica, in what is now southern Spain. Oil residue spoiled quickly, so the jars could not be reused. From the time of Augustus to the mid-200s AD they were broken and stacked here, dusted with lime. Many shards still carry stamps and painted notes naming exporters.
Milan's golden saffron risotto comes with a charming origin story. In 1574, an apprentice making stained glass for Milan Cathedral, nicknamed Saffron, supposedly colored the rice at his own wedding feast with the spice he used to tint glass. Food historian Luca Cesari says the tale seems to have first appeared in Otto Cima's 1931 book Milano Vecchia and was spread in the 1930s by Italy's national rice board. Saffron had been used in cooking, including rice dishes, since the Middle Ages, and not in stained glass.
After World War II, cocoa was scarce, so Pietro Ferrero in Piedmont made a sweet paste mostly from local hazelnuts with just a little cocoa. In 1946 his Giandujot, named after a local carnival character, was shaped into a loaf that people sliced and put on bread. In 1951 came a creamier version, Supercrema, and the knife once used for slicing became a spreading knife. The first jar of Nutella followed in 1964, its name joining the English word nut to the Italian ending -ella.
Prosciutto di Parma is allowed just two ingredients: pork and salt. Each ham carries its history on its skin. The breeder tattoos both legs of the young pig within 30 days of birth, the slaughterhouse brands each fresh leg, and a metal seal records the date curing began. By the end of aging, a trimmed ham has lost more than a quarter of its weight. Only then, under the eye of inspectors, does it get the five-point Ducal Crown brand. In 1996 it became one of the first meats with EU protected origin status.
7Twelve years in the barrel, then a designer bottle
On the tile: Balsamic1987
Traditional Balsamic Vinegar of Modena begins as cooked grape must, then ages for years as it moves through a family's set of small wooden barrels made of oak, chestnut, mulberry or juniper. It must age at least 12 years, or at least 25 to be called Extravecchio. A panel of expert tasters judges every batch. Approved vinegar goes into the same 100-milliliter bottle, designed in 1987 by car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, and each seal carries a serial number starting with A for 12 years or E for Extravecchio.
Bologna's Archaeological Museum holds a Roman stone carving with seven piglets grazing on one side and a mortar and pestle on the other. Romans used mortars to pound meat with salt and spices, and the name mortadella may come from the Latin word for mortar, or from myrtle, the flavoring of an ancient Roman sausage. On October 24, 1661, Cardinal Farnese issued a proclamation setting the rules for making mortadella. Its producers now celebrate that date as International Mortadella Day.
In Genoa, making pesto is a competitive sport. At the World Pesto Mortar Championship, 100 competitors from around the world gather in the city's Palazzo Ducale, allowed to bring their own marble mortars and wooden pestles. They cook in groups of ten, the best in each group reaches a final of ten, and a jury picks the champion. Traditional Genoese recipes explain the technique: turn the pestle gently to tear the basil leaves rather than chop them, because the fragrant oils are held in the leaves' tiny veins.
In 1891, Pellegrino Artusi, a wealthy retired businessman in Florence, could not find a publisher for his cookbook, so he paid to print it himself. Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well gathered recipes from all over Italy, peppered with his witty comments, and was written for cooking at home. Artusi published fifteen editions over twenty years, and the book has since sold more than a million copies. Its language even helped spread standard Italian across the peninsula.
In March 1986, a fast food restaurant opened near Rome's Spanish Steps, and the arrival sparked protests across Italy. Carlo Petrini and his fellow founders answered by starting the Slow Food movement, devoted to local food traditions and the pleasure of eating well. In 1989, delegates from Italy and 14 other countries signed its manifesto at the Opera Comique in Paris. The movement, whose emblem is a snail, later launched the Ark of Taste, a catalog of foods at risk of disappearing.
Tiramisu, which means pick me up, went on the menu at Le Beccherie in Treviso in 1972. Chef Roberto Linguanotto said it began with an accident: while making vanilla ice cream, he dropped mascarpone into eggs and sugar, liked the taste, and perfected the dessert with the owner's wife, Alba, adding coffee-soaked ladyfingers and cocoa. The neighboring region of Friuli Venezia Giulia disagrees. Food writers Clara and Gigi Padovani found a recipe for tirimu su served at a restaurant in Tolmezzo in 1959.
Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant living in San Diego, opened a restaurant across the border in Tijuana, Mexico, to attract Americans escaping Prohibition. As his daughter Rosa told it, on Independence Day 1924 the kitchen ran short, so he improvised a salad from romaine, olive oil, raw egg, garlic, Parmesan and Worcestershire sauce, mixed at the table. The leaves were served whole, to be eaten with the fingers. Others have claimed the invention, but Rosa turned her father's dressing into a household name.
Angelo Moriondo of Turin patented a steam coffee machine in 1884, and at the 1906 Milan Fair, Luigi Bezzera and Desiderio Pavoni showed a machine that brewed a cup to order in seconds. But steam machines reached only about 1.5 to 2 bars of pressure and could taste burnt. After World War II, Milan cafe owner Achille Gaggia built a lever machine that pushed water through the coffee at 8 to 10 bars. Out came the foam now prized as crema, and baristas working its levers coined the phrase pulling a shot.
A favorite San Francisco tale says Italian fishermen named their seafood stew when each tossed part of the catch into a shared pot, crying chip in, which in their accents became cioppino. Food historian Erica Peters says the name more likely comes from ciuppin, a northern Italian dialect word for making a fish soup. Many of the fishermen had come from Genoa. What made the stew Californian was spicy chili pepper, already listed in a fishermen's recipe, spelled chespini, that a San Francisco Call reporter printed in 1901.
On December 23, 1599, the kitchen register of the Collegio Borromeo in Pavia noted butter, raisins and spices given to the baker to make 13 big loaves for the students on Christmas Day. Those are still panettone's signature ingredients. The name comes from Milanese dialect for a big bread, and a Milanese glossary from 1606 already tied it to Christmas. Early panettone was round and nearly as flat as focaccia. Its tall dome came later, and 1920s and 1930s advertising paired it with Milan's cathedral.
The muffuletta, New Orleans's giant round sandwich, is credited to Salvatore Lupo of Central Grocery on Decatur Street. The usual story says that in 1906, Sicilian farmers coming from the nearby French Market would buy its makings there, cold cuts, cheese, bread and olive salad, and eat them separately while balancing big trays on their laps. Lupo watched them struggle and put everything into one sandwich. A 1975 newspaper article noted that street vendors had earlier sold a simpler forerunner of olives, anchovies and oil on Italian bread.
In December 2025, UNESCO added Italian cuisine to its list of intangible cultural heritage, recognizing not one dish but a whole way of cooking and eating. UNESCO described a communal activity built on respect for ingredients and shared moments at the table, where people of all ages trade recipes, suggestions and stories, and grandparents often pass traditional dishes down to their grandchildren. Italy already had 21 other traditions on the list, including the art of Neapolitan pizza making and opera singing.