Naples, Italy

Neapolitan

Soft, charred, and gone in 90 seconds.

Hydration
58–65%
Bake temp
800–950°F
Bake time
1–2 min
Ferment
8–24 h cold; 2–4 h room final proof
Oven
wood-fired domed deck
Flour
00 flour

Defining characteristics

Thin center, puffy cornicione, leoparding char, soft pillowy crumb. The pie folds like a soft towel — never crackers — and the rim should be high, airy, and freckled with black spots.

Classic examples

History

Neapolitan pizza traces to the workers' food of 18th-century Naples, where flatbread sold from street ovens fed the city's poor. The Margherita is conventionally dated to 1889 and Raffaele Esposito's purported tribute to Queen Margherita of Savoy, though the colors-of-the-flag origin story is more legend than archive. What's documented: by the late 1800s, dedicated pizzerie like Brandi and Da Michele were already firing pies in domed wood ovens, and by the 1930s the form had stabilized around a thin, soft round baked at extremely high heat for under two minutes.

The modern canon was codified in 1984 when the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN) was founded to police what could legally be called pizza napoletana. Their disciplinare specifies 00 flour, sea salt, fresh yeast or biga, hand-stretched dough no thicker than 4 mm at center, San Marzano DOP tomatoes, fior di latte or buffalo mozzarella, and a 60–90 second bake at 430–480 °C. UNESCO inscribed the art of the pizzaiuolo napoletano on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2017, cementing the form globally.

Common riffs

Marinara (no cheese, just tomato, oregano, garlic, oil) is the other AVPN-blessed canonical. Modern "contemporary Neapolitan" — Starita, I Masanielli, Franco Pepe — pushes hydration to 70%+ and proof to 24–48 hours, producing a higher cornicione and more open crumb. Stateside operators like Una Pizza Napoletana and Pizzeria Bianco run on the same playbook with American flours.

Other Neapolitan recipes