when was pizza invented

Pizza, as we recognize it today, was essentially “invented” in Naples, Italy in the late 18th to early 19th century, when bakers began topping flatbread with tomato and cheese and selling it as a street food for the poor.

Quick Scoop: The Short Version

• Ancient peoples (Greeks, Romans, Egyptians) were already baking flatbreads with toppings thousands of years ago, but these were not pizza yet.

• The word “pizza” shows up in Italian records by 997 CE, but it referred broadly to certain baked breads, not the modern dish.

• Modern pizza — flat dough topped with tomato, cheese, and other ingredients — evolved in Naples in the 1700s–early 1800s.

• Raffaele Esposito, a Neapolitan baker, is often credited with popularizing the classic tomato–mozzarella style in the late 1800s (Margherita-style pizza).

So if you want a simple date range: modern pizza was invented in Naples sometime in the 1700s to early 1800s , built on much older flatbread traditions.

Mini Timeline: From Flatbread to Pizza

1. Ancient flatbreads (thousands of years ago)
   • Mediterranean cultures baked round flatbreads and sometimes topped them with oil, cheese, herbs, or fats.

2. First use of the word “pizza” (997 CE)
   • The term “pizza” appears in a Latin document from Gaeta, southern Italy.

3. Naples and the poor (1700s)
   • In crowded Naples, workers needed cheap, filling food, so bakers sold topped flatbreads in the streets — the early form of pizza.

4. Tomatoes and cheese join the party (1700s–1800s)
   • Tomatoes, once suspected of being poisonous, gradually became a standard topping; mozzarella from the region made the combination iconic.

5. Margherita legend (1889)
   • A famous story credits Raffaele Esposito with making a tomato–mozzarella–basil pizza in honor of Queen Margherita, which helped canonize the style, though the exact details are debated.

6. Global boom (1900s)
   • Italian immigrants brought pizza to the United States; pizzerias like Lombardi’s in New York (opened 1905) helped spread it, and by the 1950s–60s pizza was a mass favorite and then re-imported back to the rest of Italy in modernized forms.

Different Ways People Answer “When Was Pizza Invented?”

Because pizza evolved, historians and food writers give slightly different “invention” points:

• “Ancient origins” view:
  • Emphasizes flatbreads in antiquity; answer sounds like “thousands of years ago” but this is about precursors, not pizza as we eat it.
• “Naples in the 18th century” view:
  • Focuses on the 1700s in Naples, when street-vendor pizza with toppings became a distinct staple food.
• “Modern pizza with tomato and mozzarella” view:
  • Narrows it to late 1700s–1800s Naples, especially with the rise of tomato-topped pies and stories around Esposito and the Margherita.

If you’re answering a quiz or SEO-style “when was pizza invented,” the safest historically grounded answer is:

Modern pizza was invented in Naples, Italy in the 18th century, becoming the tomato-and-cheese-topped dish we know today.

Bottom note: Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.