Dough made from type 00 flour, stretched only by hand, never with a rolling pin, with a raised rim one or two centimetres high that puffs up in the wood-fired oven: the cornicione. Baking takes just sixty to ninety seconds, at a temperature close to 485 degrees. The two classic variants remain the marinara, with tomato, garlic, oregano and oil, with no cheese, and the margherita, with tomato, mozzarella and basil.
The marriage of bread dough and tomato, which had arrived from the Americas, took hold in Naples in the mid-eighteenth century; the first recipe for «true Neapolitan pizza» appeared in a treatise printed in the city in 1858. The marinara takes its name from the sailors who ate it coming back from fishing in the gulf: a poor dish, ready in minutes.
According to tradition, on 11 June 1889 the pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito, of the pizzeria known today as Brandi, made a pizza with the colours of the flag for Queen Margherita di Savoia: red tomato, white mozzarella, green basil. Neapolitan pizza has been a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed since 2010, and in 2017 Unesco recognised the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo as intangible heritage of humanity.
