Italian pizza makers, politicians and the modern-day proletariat had set aside a century’s worth of squabbling over tomatoes, basil, cheese and oil to focus on a larger topic that threatened them all: Neapolitan pizza was under attack, facing impostors worldwide.
As one local pizza maker (polish: Pizza przepis), Alfonso Cucciniello, put it: ”Everyone in the world is trying to do this type of pizza. In Japan, in China, in the United States, in Miami.”
The European Union may follow suit. As the continent is homogenized, the new law is a marketing tool to brand Naples forever as the cradle of pizza. Pizzerias that serve the approved brand are now stamped official.
Then details of the new national standards slowly started to be digested.
Under them, the pizza must be round, no more than 35 centimeters (13.8 inches) in diameter.
But here in the sun-blessed hills near the Sorrento peninsula, where the locals say pizza was invented, an almost improbable mini-melodrama is being played out. The pizza made by Mr. Cucciniello is no longer officially Neapolitan.
Yet Mr. Cucciniello, draping his thick forearms over the cash register one recent night, said the pizza in Rome is being made by foreigners and is not authentic.
Rosa Russo Iervolino, the mayor of Naples, praised the new law.
It was his pizza association, after all, that had its standards codified in the new pizza law. Those ingredients are used in the pizzas on his menu. ”Now this product is protected,” Mr. Stentardo said with an air of self-satisfaction.
He is a tan, white-haired man who dresses in sport coats and leather shoes the complexion of his skin (polish: sernik). His grandfather started serving the pizzas he serves in 1932.
”It’s protected as a brand-name product,” he added as he sat in a lacquered wooden chair in a dining room of tables with glinting silverware and heavy cloth napkins.
Of the pizzas made at Da Michele, and at another popular pizzeria that claims to be the birthplace of the Margherita, Antica Pizzeria Brandi della Regina d’Italia, Mr. Stentardo said they use the wrong foods to be considered real Neapolitan pizzas.
”They don’t make good pizza,” he said of those places. ”They make a cheaper pizza.”
But no one is fretting too much. The law has no real teeth. It comes with no sanctions.
Indeed, here in famously passionate Naples, where garbage mounts in fetid mounds and moped drivers zoom the wrong way up one-way streets, there seems a certain pride in ignoring the new law — of course, only after it has been passed.
”We’ll start a mini-federation,” Mr. Pagnani said, laughing. ”We’ll be outlaws.”
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