Pompeii archaeologists discover 'pizza' painting
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Many people that are great at painting now probably never "studied" painters before them. They just, experimented and practiced for years. All you need is the real world and practice.
Besides the general absurdity of your claim, how are you surprised that an artist can become great solely by drawing from the world around them? That’s how almost every single artist becomes great. It’s literally one of the most basic forms of practice.
The Romans had industrial scale milling in modern-day France, enough to feed 10-40k people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills
Antikythera mechanism predates that by 500 years.
I'm curious what technologies were lost for thousands of years. Roman concrete is essentially lost, Silphium is extinct, flexible glass, and Greek fire.
Modern technology is lost in bits and pieces: Starlite is one example. Unknown unknowns are the most elusive.
http://publish.illinois.edu/litlanglibrary/2020/07/23/the-ae...
What do you need to “technically” be considered a pizza?
Enough people don't want tomato and so you get a "pizza bianca" without tomatoes. Enough people don't tolerate mozzarella so you've got "pizza rossa" without mozzarella.
I guess that a pizza without both mozzarella and without tomatoes may be considered by most to be just a focaccia but I'm pretty sure somebody will point out some place in Italy where that's how they make the "true pizza" anyway
lol
The word pizza most likely comes from the Greek word pitta -- what we know as pita bread. Naples was a Greek city for millennia until its own city-statehood and then eventual incorporation into Italy in the second half of 1800s. Naples had Greek food, and thus Greek's celebrated flatbread. By Italy's own historical documents, pizzas were neither a dish we know today (pizzas were synonymous with focaccias in Italy) nor a popular dish in Italy until American occupation of Italy in WW2 as American soldiers, who wanted their high-temperature coal-fired NY pizzas in their occupied country.
Nat Geo has a piece on how the birth of Margherita pizza (thus modern pizza) by Raffaele Esposito in Naples was actually based on forgery of historical records by the restaurant/chef to promote its sales in mid-1900s. Italian experts and officials almost always repeat this thoroughly debunked fabrication and awarded an official government plaque.
tldr; the original flatbread "ancient pizza" was Greek food, not Italian. Modern pizza originally was an American thing, not Italian.
This is not to say Neapolitan pizza is a bad pizza. People of Naples should rightly be proud of it.
During the Greek influence period there was indeed a flat bread with toppings. That was popular throughout the Mediterranean, including Egypt.
So, the question is mainly where to draw the line between what constitutes modern pizza, what constitutes pizza predecessors and what constitutes contemporary evolution of the modern pizza (e.g. pineapple pizza or deep dish Chicago style pizza, which is obviously a thing but it's also quite different from the original modern pizza).
Fwiw in recent years I'm noticing a resurgence of the "pinsa romana" which is a variation on the theme and is gaining popularity likely because people just want a bit of change.
If people should take away anything from your comment this is it. The pizza popular the world over is a purely American (mostly NYC) creation. Italians can not simultaneously claim the pizza for themselves and denounce the US variety as something foreign.
Yet they will, because for some reason Italians are voracious to appropriate others food culture as their own. I genuinely cannot understand it. Is it ego? Given the attitude even Italian Americans have, that’s my only guess.
Every Italian has the “best” recipe for x, but won’t share it because its a “family tradition”. They decry anything that isn’t “authentic Italian cuisine”, despite that being such a nebulous term given how one of the cores of their modern cuisine, tomatoes, is not local to the region. I’ve even had some throw random Italian words into conversations as though they needed to actively prove how “Italian” they were.
It’s like, I don’t understand this. I understand being patriotic, but it’s like every single Italian and Italian American has been incredibly insecure of their heritage, and this possibly extends to the whole country.
Secondly, nothing of what I wrote is written based on the idea that I am superior to Italians based on their traits. Only that I find their inability to value their culture and appropriation of others’ culture confusing.
And finally, your name is “namaria”, which sounds close to “marinara” and is almost an anagram for it. Thus I judge you of being an upsetti spaghetti Italian.