91. Pizza

"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore" Dean Martin sang the well-known Harry Warren tune, forever associating pizza with love. In the same song he tells us that that connection is particularly true in "Old Napoli," where pizza is a soul food, treated with a reverence akin to a religious experience. In Naples there is even an Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana (Association for Authentic Neapolitan Pizza) that certifies restaurants making real Neapolitan pizza with a sign they can display in their windows like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Italians, and particularly Neapolitans, have good reason to be serious about upholding particular standards for pizza, because the food has become even more universal than hamburgers, and some of its varieties bear very little resemblance to the real thing. Particularly American concoctions like pizza with pineapple and ham, for example, or pizza with chicken and walnuts, are to Italians what the designated hitter is to baseball purists. They may taste all right, but don't call them pizza. Italians also eschew the American tendency to pile ingredient upon ingredient on pizza so that the resulting product is a sampler of a half dozen or more meats and vegetables whose tastes have nullified one another.

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