Italy Cooking Vacations: The Art of Neapolitan-Style Pizza

Pizzerias and cooking classes about pizza abound in Naples, Sorrento, and the Amalfi Coast — but what makes the thin-crust pizza in Italy so different? Or maybe “different” isn’t the right word. After all, Italians made the pizza famous, and as such, their recipes are the foundation for the pizzas that followed.

The recipe for the now famous dish started back in the 10th century when it was just a piece of dough used to test the temperature inside an oven. It wasn’t until the 19th century, 1889 to be exact, that the popularity of pizza really started.

It began in the kitchen of Raffaele Esposito, a baker who owned a tavern called Pizzeria di Petro e Basta Cosi. As the story goes, King Umberto and Queen Margherita commissioned three kinds of pizzas. One of those was made with patriotic colored ingredients – red tomato sauce, white mozzarella and green basil, the colors of the Italian flag – and it ended up being the Queen’s favorite, hence its name even today: Pizza Margherita.

Learn more about Naples.

Pizza has taken many shapes and featured many flavors over the years, but there’s something special and different about the pizza it Italy. Maybe it’s the ’00’ flour they use that is hard to find outside Italy, or maybe it’s the special wood-fire ovens. Whatever it is, the pizza in Southern Italy is part of the region’s very culture and has been for centuries, and it’s one of the many reasons we highly recommend you visit it on an Italy cooking vacation with The International Kitchen!

Check out all our Amalfi Coast culinary vacations.

Every family has their own special touches when making their thin-crust pizza. The chef of our cooking vacation Mediterranean Cooking Experience delights in showing how our culinary travelers how to create true Neapolitan-style pizza. You can get your hands dirty as you make the pizza dough in the morning and enjoy the fruits of your labor that night for dinner.

Learn about types of pizza around the world.

You can also learn about making true Italian pizza at Culinary Experience on the Amalfi Coast during a cooking class, or during our and Flavors of Campania cooking vacation. The key ingredients in any of our pizza classes is, of course, a wood-fired oven!

The Sorrento and Amalfi Coasts aren’t the only place to discover the art of pizza either. Chef Andrea in Tuscany can also do pizza cooking classes, and he’ll show just how different pizza from one region to the next can be.

Interested in a pizza cooking class or cooking vacation? Contact us today.

By Peg Kern

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Originally published October 26, 2012.