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.
  1. First use of the word “pizza” (997 CE)
    • The term “pizza” appears in a Latin document from Gaeta, southern Italy.
  1. 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.
  1. 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.
  1. 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.
  1. 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.