Winner & National Champion: Anna Maria Garoscio One of two Female Contestants.
Dolce Elba toppings: Puree of Watercress, Pesto, Valeriana, Pine Nuts and Black Olives

The winner and national champion is a self-effacing youthful Ligurian grandmother, Anna Maria Garoscio, one of only two female contestants. Her Tavernetta “La Rampa” is located in Via Barberis Colomba, 18035 Dolceacqua, (Imperia), tel. 011-39-0184- 206198, closed Monday. She garnished her “Dolce Elba” with purée of watercress, pesto, valeriana, pine-nuts, and black olives.

Long Before Elba
Although pizza was almost certainly born more than 3,000 years ago in ancient Egypt, etymologists believe the term “pizza” is derived from an old Italian word meaning “a point”, which in turn led to the modern Italian word pizzicare, meaning “to pinch” or “to pluck”. This word appears for the first time in a Neapolitan dialect as early as the year 997 at Gaeta, a port between Rome and Naples, and refers, perhaps, to the manner in which the hot pie is plucked from the brick oven.

Pizza, made with flour, yeast, salt and water, has obvious analogies in Greek and Middle Eastern pita and flat, seasoned yeast breads like Moroccan Khboz Bishemar, but it is definitely the single food most firmly associated with Naples. The first documented pizzas were eaten in ancient Pompeii and Herculaneum, where archaeologists have uncovered brick pizzas ovens. But it was pizza without tomatoes, for, of course, 1,500 years had to elapse before the first tomato would be seen in Europe, when, according to local legend, Neapolitan sailors brought the first seeds back from Peru.

Although the tomato was held in low esteem by most Europeans, the poor people of Naples, subsisting quite literally on their daily bread, added this new ingredient to their yeast dough and created the first simple pizza, which they ate with their hands. By the seventeenth century it had achieved a notoriety among visitors who would go to poor neighborhoods to taste this peasant dish made by “pizzaioli” (pizza makers), but it still remained a local dish. Another appassionato was Ferdinand IV (1751-1825), the conservative and reactionary King of Naples and of the Two Sicilies, who liked to go incognito to savor pizza in the Salita Santa Teresa. To give his bride, the Austrian princess Marie Caroline, sister of Marie Antoniette, a taste, he invited the famous pizzaiolo Armando Testa to Court. Testa’s pizza was such a success that the king wanted to honor him, but the only recognition Testa wanted was to be called Monsù, like the French chefs at Court.

Also, it was not until the nineteenth century—about three hundred years after the tomato—that mozzarella cheese (made from buffalo, not cow’s, milk) became a standard pizza ingredient. Legend has it that the famous Neapolitan pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito of the Pizzeria di Pietro (or maybe his wife Pasqualina Brandi) was the first to make the mozzarella, basil, and tomato pizza in honor of the visit to Naples on November 6, 1889 of Italy’s Queen Margherita. Thinking that the commonly-used seasoning of bad-smelling garlic was unworthy of royalty, he replaced it with mozzarella. This dish, thereafter pizza Margherita or tricolore (after the three colors of the toppings and of the Italian flag), became very popular immediately. The other truly genuine, yet older (thus sometimes called “the queen mother”), Neapolitan pizza is called marinara either because it was the first food fisherman ate on return from their catch or because its toppings of oil, tomato, garlic and oregano could be stowed on voyages so that sailors (marinai) of this seafaring city could make pizza away from home.