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Tony Adams
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Florence - Rome
In March of 2006, I went to Florence and Rome to look at art and architecture and see what pizza is like in Italy. I took some photos. This account is rendered more or less chronologically and probably does not take advantage of hypertext in the way that it should.

5 Marzo, 2006
Pizzaria La Routa, via Angelo Emo 25. I spend an hour wandering lost... well, sort of lost. I have a map on which I can plot my lostness nearly exactly. I was shooting for an area just outside the eastern walls of the Vatican. One wrong turn and I seemed to be irrecoverably stuck on the west side of that nutty Vatican. Not that I'd actually seen any such Vatican at that point - just a big looming can't-get around-it hill. After pursuing a few dead ends - uphill dead-ends of course, I see a pizzarria. Wasn't that what I set out to find anyway?
Here in the states we also have a thing that goes by the name "Pizza Margharita" but it is a different animal. At La Routa, and at pretty much every other dozen or so pizza places I visited, a Pizza Margherita is a thin crust pizza with a small amount of tomato sauce and a generous pile of mozzarella cheese. Not slices of fresh mozzarella, just shredded regular old mozarella. The crust at La Routa was extremely thin - the thinnest I'd have on my whole trip. A few seconds of spying at the open kitchen revealed the secret tool for this amazingly thin and consistently thin crust - a rolling pin!

Now I'm not gonna name any names, but a dear friend of mine chastized me up one side and down the other a year or so ago for using a rolling pin on my pizza crusts. It seemed like the obvious way to go. However, in the USA it is simply not done. Observation of a few pizza chefs in action here confirmed it. After my chastizement and my abandonment of the pin my crusts DID improve dramatically. But I was never aiming for anything as thin as the La Routa crust. So there you have it.

Slices or Squares?
Another burning controversy in Chicago anyway is the Slice vs Squares debate. Chicago pizzarias have been cutting their larger pizzas into tiny squares since the beginning of time. The reasoning is that given the less foldable crust, a small square is easier to manage than a big sloppy slice of the size that would result from cutting a huge pizza into slices. Newcomers to the area, especially those from the east coast find this practice to be a heresy of the most soul endangering proportions. A pizza must be cut into slices! they claim. In Rome if you get whole pizza it is not cut AT ALL except by the customer. You get a pie perhaps a bit larger than your plate. There is none of this small, large, extra-large, somewhat extra large rigamarole either. If you need more pizza you just order more pizzas.

to be continued

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