A Pizza Post!

In honor of LOST IN ROME coming to ‘tween readers everywhere, I’m blogging about pizza!!

Seriously, what an amazingly delicious invention from the lovely land of Italy! In Lost in Rome Lucy Rossi lands the best summer job EVER at Amore Pizzeria.

In honor of Lost in Rome, I’m going to share some pizza trivia today! Some of it is just plain fun, and some of it goes deep. (ha!)

-The first use of the word “pizza” was in a Latin text (dated 997 AD) and here’s what was said: “a tenant of certain property is to give the bishop duodecim pizze (“twelve pizzas”) every Christmas Day, and another twelve every Easter Sunday”

-Pizza first came to America with the Italian immigrants in the late 19th century, and the first proper pizzeria in America opened in 1905. That pizzeria, Lombardi’s in New York City, is still open (a block from its original location) and is recognized as the oldest pizzeria in the country by the Guinness Book of World Records.

-US military were the first to be introduced to Italian cuisine.  Now, Americans can’t get enough of it!   Let’s look at some numbers…

-13% of the entire US population eats pizza on any given day. Among males age 6-19, the number spiked to over 25%! Holy mozzarella, boys, dial it back!

-Approximately 3 BILLION pizzas are sold in the US per year making pizza a $32 BILLION industry. And there are 9,000 pizzerias in the state of New York alone! (I’ll bet nobody is surprised to hear that New Yorkers REALLY love their pizza)

-San Marzano tomatoes are world-renowned for their amazing flavor. And they, too, are really serious business. Falsely marking a can of tomatoes as San Marzano is a serious crime, because true San Marzanos fetch a pretty penny in the market. In 2010, Italian police confiscated 1.2 billion Euros worth of tomatoes illegally marked as San Marzanos.

-Italians used to (and many still do) make their mozzarella from the milk of native water buffalo.  Like like San Marzano tomatoes it is now a legally defined product.

All this pizza talk has got me hungry, so that’s all for today! Ciao!