Kylie in Italy: Food

Pizza Night

I've learnt a sad fact; you can't have multicultural hunger urges in Milan. Well, you can, but they wont be satisfied. I mean the sudden craving for a nice meal of sushi, kebabs, or fajitas. Actually, anything other than pizza.

The Italians are so unashamedly proud of their pizza cooking ability, that every street has a minimum five pizzerias or trattorias, and all with a fairly similar array of choices. Not that I'm complaining. I've been a pizza lover from way back, and living here has only served to remind me just why I love it so much.

And I'm not alone - all the girls love pizza. My cliquey group of wonderful girl friends all managed to charm their way into an early night off on Wednesday, so we could wallow in our own grand fortune of living in Milan, over wine and pizza. The location was a given - we go to the same place every time.

The rendevous was arranged for Premiata Pizzeria, in the centre of Milan. In all honesty, the ambience is nothing special, but the 'vip' treatment they give out puts them up a notch from the rest. In typical Italian style, the boys serve up heart-shaped pizzas and shots of lemoncello, without us even hinting (and free alcohol is obviously enough to keep us coming back!)

And it was while we were out for dinner that we were overcome with intense curiosity about the origin of the world famous Italian pizza. So, I investigated. It seems the history is a little vague, and some of my sources are probably a little undependable so its hard to distinguish fact from fiction, but here's what I've heard:

Fact one, (clearly undisputable), it all started in Napoli, apparently in the 1800s. This, I do not question, as I have been to Napoli, and I have the utmost confidence in declaring that Napolitan pizzas are the best pizzas ever produced, and are clearly made by the hand of the original creator.

Then the story jumps a little to 1889 when King Umberto I and his queen, the 'food loving' Margherita, came on the scene. (This is the point where the already skeptical story becomes a little more skeptical). It seems the couple were inquisitive about this new pizza phenomenon and gave it a go one night. Margherita took a liking to one type in particular - made from fresh tomato, plenty of basil, and a covering of mozzarella cheese. Hence the ever-so-popular Margherita pizza of today.

I think it's a pretty believable story. The menu's of today surely support it. The Margherita is always on the menu, usually in pole position at top of the list, and nine times out of ten, it's chosen by one of the group. But for me, Margherita is a little too boring. However, I don't endeavour to be too weird either. So, I'm ashamed to say its reached the point where I don't even bother to waste the time opening the menu, when I know, predictably, I'll be ordering the same thing as always. And it's precious wine drinking time I'd be losing, so most definitely not worth the look! Wednesday night I chose rucola, again.

But rucola is the safe bet. I traveled the length of Italy last August and ate rucola pizza in nearly every town we stopped in (as I said, there's little opportunity for multi-cultural dinners), and it was the tried and true that triumphed every time. The one moment I did get a tad adventurous, I regretted it horribly. It was a rucola pizza with a twist - some kind of un-cooked baby tomato type things that I ended up having to time-consumingly extract from the pizza topping. So I learnt my lesson, and am faithful to rucola forever more.

Still, I don't really know what makes Italian pizzas so much better than any other country's. At home, the more stuff you could pile onto a pizza, the better it seemed. And there were no boundaries as far as the list of weird ingredients involved. In Italy it would be criminal to put pineapple on a pizza (and yep, Hawaiian did use to be my favorite!), yet they seem to think its ok to heap on the artichokes. So weird, but somehow it works, and after 18 months of a staple pizza diet, I still haven't had enough of it!

• See also :
• History of Pizza
• How to make Pizza at Home