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Half the traditions date from the nineteen-fifties
Peppe's closing line is a serious claim and a well-supported one. The Margherita story — the pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito, Queen Margherita of Savoy, the tricolour on a plate in 1889 — rests on a single thank-you note whose authenticity has been questioned, and pizza with tomato, cheese and basil is attested in Naples before the visit. The queen plausibly ate one; the pizza was not invented for her. Historians of Italian food, most prominently Alberto Grandi, have made a wider argument along the same lines about panettone, tiramisù, carbonara and the geography of Parmigiano, and it provokes real anger whenever it surfaces. The interesting part is what the anger is actually about, because the food is not in question. A disciplinare is a document about method, and Neapolitan pizza holds a European designation that specifies the dough, the yeast, the oven and the time without making any claim about an inventor. That is the distinction Alex lands on: a recipe can be protected without a founding myth. What the myth supplies is not quality but continuity — the sense that a thing has always been done this way — and in a country unified in 1861, with the linguistic history Lesson 81 described, continuity is the scarcer commodity. Note the grammar doing the work throughout this conversation: si sostiene che for the claim, è documentata for the evidence, and the mood of the verb marking which is which.