Naples, Italy – I stood at the epicenter of the pizza world.
That’s not such a bold statement if you consider a set of widely held truths. If Italy has the best pizza in the world and Naples has the best pizza in Italy, then the pinprick on planet Earth representing its pizza heaven is the corner of Via Cesare Sersale and Via P. Colletta in Naples.
On my 2004 list of the five best pizzas in the world, the restaurant on Via Colletta, Trianon, was No. 1. Trianon is an 83-year-old Naples institution that boasts a prosciutto pizza that tasted like tomatoes off a vine with a rich, doughy crust that could be considered a dessert if it wasn’t connected to such luscious, lean prosciutto.
I only went to Trianon that night five years ago because I could not get into Da Michele, widely considered Naples’ best pizzeria on the next corner.
The line out of Da Michele that night was halfway up the Amalfi Coast. After trying it on my recent stopover from the lovely Italian isle of Ischia, I could see why.
It shouldn’t be surprising, however, finding this slice of pizza heaven here. Naples is a vibrant city with great markets and beautiful seascapes but it has always been more famous for three things: drivers who view traffic lights as mere street decorations, a vicious organized crime family called the Camorra known for the lovely practice of “kneecapping,” and the birthplace of pizza.
I didn’t rent a car and I passed on Camorra’s high-grade heroin, but I did have lunch. Da Michele is located 10 minutes from the den of chaos also known as the Naples train station. I walked through Piazza Risorgimento, lined with immigrant street merchants selling everything from sunglasses to embarrassingly bad costume jewelry.
I walked up teeming Corso Umberto where people spoke in the Neapolitan dialect: conversational screaming. Neapolitans discuss everything from a fender bender to Dante’s “Inferno” at the same volume usually accompanying the escape from a burning building.
But I saw Neapolitans stand in rapt silence when I passed Trianon and found Da Michele. Standing outside were 30 people from all walks of Neapolitan society – lovers, businessmen, families – waiting with numbers in their hands.
It’s an odd setting for the world’s best pizza. Da Michele is represented by a simple white and red sign over a single glass door. After only a 10-minute wait, I walked into, if not the best pizza parlor in the world, certainly the most unassuming. Da Michele has only 16 tables in two rooms, all jammed together for a complete lack of privacy. On the wall were various sizes of brass pizza tins and black and white photos of old Naples.
I joined a table with an elderly man and a woman. I could nearly feel the fire burning from the wood stove where a heavily muscled, long-haired Italian with a Fu Manchu was shoveling pizzas with a big wooden slab. The tiny room smelled of fresh tomatoes and oregano. I suddenly craved pizza like a junkie.
The interior is as fancy as the menu, on which every item could be listed on the fringe of a Vatican postage stamp. At Da Michele, you have two choices of pizza: marinara, consisting of tomato sauce, garlic and oregano, or margherita, also known as Neapolitan, which is mozzarella and tomato sauce.
That’s it. The whole ball game. No California-designer tofu special. No four-meat conglomeration at 1,000 calories a slice. It’s marinara or margherita or hop back on the plane to a Domino’s near you. Pizza with no meat and no choice? What’s up with that?
A hand-painted placard on the wall explained it in the Neapolitan dialect, which the elderly man at my table translated into Italian for me. He said his father had gone here as a child. Presumably so did his father’s father and his father before that. Da Michele has occupied this little space since 1870.
The story of Da Michele’s menu goes back way before World War I. As the man explained, Da Michele wants to keep pizza affordable for all people and simple enough to appreciate what pizza was meant to be when it was invented in Naples in the 19th century.
After all, pizza has remained one of Naples’ four major food groups along with wine, mozzarella and gelato. Why mess with perfection?
As a mandolin player buzzed our table, my normale-sized marinara pizza, priced at 3.50 euros (about $4.25), arrived. The foot-wide pizza glistened in a sea of fresh tomato sauce with specks of oregano floating like little spice ships.
The pizza was surprisingly wonderful in its simplicity. The sauce reminded me of the tomatoes I ate like apples from my public market in Rome. The crust was classically Neapolitan, slightly doughy with just a hint of burnt around the edges.
I tried a slice of margherita and the mozzarella tasted nearly as sweet as the special balls Naples ships every morning to mozzarella bars in Rome, Milan and London. I didn’t miss the meat. My soon-empty pie pan had no grease on it.
Did it crack my top five, a list more exclusive than Baseball’s Hall of Fame? Yeah. Did it top my prosciutto pizza at Trianon as No. 1 in the world? Without starting another street war in Naples, I’d say no. I’m a hopeless carnivore.
But a return to Naples is a return to pizza’s roots. Da Michele is as far from Pizza Hut’s stuffed crust super supreme meat-inhaler’s pile-it-on artery-exploding combo pizza as you can get. And well worth the trip.
Staff writer John Henderson covers sports and writes about the food he eats on the road. He can be reached at 303-820-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
Pizza by a Napoletano
Looking for Neapolitan-style pizza in Denver? Hit Virgilio’s in Lakewood. Virgilio himself was born in Naples, so he knows from pizza, and his Margherita version (tomato sauce, basil, garlic, and olive oil) is one of the best pies in town.
Virgilio’s Pizzeria Napoletana
7986 W. Alameda Ave, Lakewood, 303-985-2777
-Tucker Shaw
