Pizza: from Greek ‘pitta’ to global flatbread

This pizza came from our own oven, though the dough still refuses to stretch as thin as the Neapolitans manage. The word itself first appears in a Latin charter of 997 AD, when a tenant paid his rent in twelve pizzas. It may come from Greek ‘pitta’ meaning ‘cake’ or from the Lombardic ‘pizzo’ meaning ‘bite’. In Italian, it once meant any tart or flatbread. Only in eighteenth-century Naples did it take the familiar form of dough topped with tomato and cheese. From there it travelled to America, and then everywhere else.