Last November – which in the current predicament seems like a lifetime away – my wife and I went to the Last Supper in Pompeii exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The temporary exhibition, which closed on 12 January 2020, “include[d] about 300 objects loaned by Naples and Pompeii, many of which have never left Italy before” (Brown 2019). The exhibition gave us the unprecedented opportunity to see in person some of the most breathtaking remains ever discovered in the history of Roman archaeology.
However, during our visit we spotted a baffling passage in the caption of one terra sigillata pottery showcase (no. 8.1). Here’s the troubling statement:
“There are deep cut marks in the base - perhaps someone cut a cake or a pizza too forcefully.” [my emphasis]
Fig. 2. Wait, what?! A pizza in Roman Pompeii?! A (rather questionable) caption from the Last Supper in Pompeii exhibition. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 10 November 2019 (CC BY-ND 4.0, L. Ambasciano).
A bit of historical context might come in handy now. While some Mediterranean precursors of flatbreads, pittas, and focaccias with various toppings and condiments are historically well known, “pizza” as we know it today is a rather modern invention. The name itself is at least Medieval in origin: “pizza” is reported in the Codex Cajetanus, dated 997 CE, that is, more than five centuries after the collapse of the Western Roman empire (Romeo 1962: 22, note no. 3). Tomato, one of the signature ingredients of modern pizza, was imported in Europe only after its discovery in the New World and listed in Neapolitan cookbooks just at the end of the 17th century (Mattozzi 2015). What we might recognize today as some sort of “pizza” was definitely born in the following century in the Kingdom of Naples, and the now classical margherita is unofficially recorded to have been
“named in honor of Italy’s queen [Margherita of Savoy, 1851-1926] on a visit to Naples just over a century ago, combin[ing] tomato with mozzarella cheese and fresh basil leaves to symbolize the red, white, and green tricolore of the Italian flag” (Davidson 2014 [1999]: 630).
It was quite the serendipitous stroke of marketing genius, for at that time the soon-to-be-rebranded form of Neapolitan pizza already had a history behind it, although not so deep as to dating back to ancient Rome. The same basic recipe for the margherita version was indeed already attested to in historical documents dating from the early 1800s, when the Kingdom of Italy was yet to come and the Roman empire was long gone (Mattozzi 2015). Unfortunately for the citizens of Pompeii, modern pizza had yet to be invented.
FIG. 3. Definitely NOT a Roman pizza. Homemade margherita with oregano (purists beware: fresh basil leaves were unavailable because of the current Covid-19 lockdown), 3 May 2020. © L. Ambasciano.
Why, then, did the curator of an exhibition focused on the history of food decide to put in there such an anachronistic reference? Was that caption meant to be a joke for the learned visitor? However, there was no exclamation point at the end of the sentence and no other signs of this kind of humour elsewhere. If that was indeed the case, I confess that I found the joke rather displeasing, if not stereotypical (Romans = Italians = pizza!), and I sincerely believe that visitors not particularly acquainted with the minutiae of historiography would read this anachronistic caption as true at face value.
Thus, as a historian, I found that caption rather deceiving insofar as it contributed to spread geohistorical misinformation. I wrote an email to the exhibition curator on 20 December 2019, but I have never received an answer. I hope that this short note will help ensure a higher degree of accuracy and vetting of the information provided to visitors in one of the most respected cultural institutions in Europe.
Notes
This post has been updated on 15 May 2020 and 7 December 2021.
Refs.
Brown, M. (2019). “Baked Dormouse and Other Roman Delicacies Come to Oxford.” The Guardian, 24 July. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jul/24/baked-dormouse-and-other-roman-delicacies-come-to-oxford
Davidson, A. (ed.) (2014). The Oxford Companion to Food. Third Edition edited by T. Jaine. First published in 1999. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mattozzi, A. (2015). Inventing the Pizzeria: A History of Pizza Making in Naples. Translated and edited by Z. Nowak. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Romeo, L. (1962). “Pizza, pinza, and pitta.” Romance Philology 16(1): 22-29. Article Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44939367