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Pizza is an oven-baked, flat, disc-shaped bread typically topped with a tomato sauce, cheese and various toppings. Originating in Italy, from the Neapolitan cuisine, the dish has become popular in many parts of the world. Pizza is one of the national foods of Italy.

The Ancient Greeks covered their bread with oils, herbs and cheese. In Byzantine Greek, the word was spelled πίτα or pita, meaning pie.

The word has now spread to Turkish as pide,^[2] Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian as pita, Albanian as pite and Modern Hebrew pittāh.^[3] The Romans developed placenta, a sheet of flour topped with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves. Modern pizza originated in Italy as the Neapolitan pie with tomato. In 1889, cheese was added.^[4]

King Ferdinand I (1751–1825) is said to have disguised himself as a commoner and, in clandestine fashion, visited a poor neighborhood in Naples. One story has it that he wanted to sink his teeth into a food that the queen had banned from the royal court—pizza.^[5]

In 1889, during a visit to Naples, Queen Margherita of Italy was served a pizza resembling the colors of the Italian flag, red (tomato), white (mozzarella) and green (basil). This kind of pizza has been named after the Queen as Pizza Margherita.

[2] Definition of pide