Famous dish
Pizza is a dish that everybody has heard of. You can find it in almost every country in the world. But real pizza started in Italy. The word 'pizza' comes from the Latin word 'pinsere'. Pinsere means 'to press'.
A mysterious history
Nobody is really sure about the beginnings of pizza. People have probably been putting things on top of bread and eating it for a very long time. The ancient Greeks used to put garlic and onions on bread, for example. But most people agree that real pizza were not made until tomatoes came to Europe. Tomatoes, like tobacco and chillis, came from South America. At first, most people thought they were poisonous because of their colour. But, by the late 1700s, poor people in Napoli, Italy, were putting tomato sauce on thin bread and putting it in the oven.
A food for everyone
Today pizza is everywhere. In Japan, people like to put corn on their pizza. On the mainland, people like fruit pizza. Thai people like spicy pizza. Hawaiian pizza has pineapple on it.
A lot of pizza outside Italy is not very thin. This is because it's difficult to make a very thin pizza. It's also because people want it to be more of a meal. A thin pizza with only sauce, herbs and oil on it is not very filling.
