Research conducted by the Pizza.it Editorial Team at the Sormani Library in Milan and other public libraries, studying historical texts and ancient books.
The Origin of Pizza – The Myth
Numerous stories recount the birth of the world’s most famous dish — often conflicting interpretations, almost like a parochial dispute over whether pizza has Greek, Egyptian, Italian, or more specifically Neapolitan origins. To avoid falling into such a debate, or into historical inaccuracies, why not trace the birth of pizza back to the very origins of mankind? And what better way to make this connection than through myth and the rituals that followed from it?
And so it is that pizza — in our view, the sun of the Mediterranean Sea — that combination of colours and flavours, descended from the legendary flatbread made of flour, has a very ancient divine ancestor, born from the age-old struggle between Good and Evil.
Demeter and the Birth of the Ritual
In Greek mythology, the idea of this struggle is embodied in the myth of Demeter — sister of Jupiter, known as Ceres to the Romans — goddess of grain, who personified the generative force of the earth kissed by the life-giving sun. Demeter, the embodiment of Good, of life, of the abundance of golden ears of wheat, bore with Zeus a daughter, Persephone, the most beautiful creature on earth, a happy and carefree young girl.
But one day, Evil — personified by Hades, lord of the underground realm of the Underworld, a cruel and merciless god — abducted Persephone while she was picking flowers far from her mother, and carried her off to the kingdom of the dead. To bind Persephone to him forever, Hades made the girl eat a pomegranate seed, for anyone who had descended into the afterlife and eaten something there could never return to the world of the living.
Demeter then began searching for her daughter in every known place, wandering without food or drink for nine days and nine nights. When her search proved fruitless, the goddess decided she would never return to Olympus until she had found her daughter, leaving the earth barren and lifeless. Vegetation withered, harvests dried up, and Evil seemed to have won.
Demeter wandered the world like a beggar, until she arrived unrecognised at Eleusis, at the home of King Celeus and his wife Metanira, whose youngest child — deprived of his mother’s milk — was close to death. It was then that Demeter, to repay their hospitality, set aside for a moment her grief as a mother whose daughter had been taken from her, and remembered that she was life itself — and it is life itself that she would restore to the sick child, with a gesture of love, offering him her immortal milk. King Celeus and Queen Metanira then built a temple at Eleusis in honour of the goddess Ceres-Demeter, and that act of devotion was the first step towards the victory of Good over Evil.
Zeus, concerned that without Demeter’s blessing the order of the universe would be overturned, sought to have Persephone returned to her mother through a compromise: the girl would spend four months of the year with Hades in the Underworld — corresponding to autumn and winter — and four months with her mother Demeter on Olympus, the period of the earth’s fertility, of spring and summer.
The Eleusinian Ritual and the Origin of Pizza
It is with that immortal milk — which saved the life of the sick child — that the cult of Ceres-Demeter and its ritual libations finds its origin in the temple at Eleusis. But what did these libations consist of?
We read in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter:
“…And Metanira, filling a cup with wine sweeter than honey, offered it to her. But the Goddess refused it: to drink the crimson wine, she said, was not permitted to her. Instead she asked that flour be mixed with water and fragrant pennyroyal, and that this be offered to her to drink. The sacred drink was prepared and offered, as the Goddess had wished. The venerable Goddess accepted it: ‘this was the beginning of the ritual.’”
The drink, made of flour, water and pennyroyal — an aromatic herb (Ocimum Basilicum) — was the beginning of the ritual, a devotion to prosperity, to the abundance of the earth, that is to say, to life itself. Over the centuries, through small variations in preparation, the drink undoubtedly became a food, while the legendary ingredients remained unchanged. It took no more than increasing the quantity of flour, working it, dressing it with olive oil, and exposing it to flame, to arrive at the pizza sold by the placentarii of Naples and Pompeii. But this was only the beginning…
