Living in Italy

The author who wrote a brief history of pizza once wrote that pizza was a poor food in history. And it has no direct relationship with the Italian city of Pisa. Because in Italian, pizza is written as pizza, and the city of Pisa is called Pisa. They are two completely different words, and the letters are too short, so they do not belong to the same root. Furthermore, there are some differences in the way of pronunciation in Italian, just like the joke between "Fuzhou" and "Huzhou", which can only be used as a joke. In normal times, eight poles cannot hit one side.

The local pizza in Italy is not as fancy as Pizza Hut. They're unpretentious, yet delicious. The most famous one is probably the pizza Margherita that Anne Hathaway munches on in Eat, Pray and Love.

Before going abroad, our foreign teacher once taught us how to identify Margherita pizza: if there are only red and white on the pizza, it is Margherita pizza. If the brown color of smoked fish is also added to it. Or the tender pink color of Parma ham, that's not it. Because although Margherita pizza has a great reputation, its ingredients are simple, just mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce. Hence the brown, pink, and green pizzas that are neither. Later, I traveled around Italy. When it was sometimes difficult to adapt to the local special cheese and specialty pizza, I would choose Margherita pizza. Its familiar and fixed taste made my heart feel like I was home.

Although Margherita pizza is famous, it seems that it is well-known but not favored locally. At least, it's not always first on the pizzeria's menu, not something people see at a glance.

When I first arrived in Italy, the pizza shop I frequented most often was the one downstairs from my apartment. At first I was dazzled when I took the store's advertising flyer, which listed twenty or thirty types of pizza, including Neapolitan pizza. Roman pizza and four-season pizza make people feel confused. They don’t know what pizza has to do with these place names and seasons. Then I thought about it, don’t we also have Shandong multi-grain pancakes, Lanzhou ramen and other delicacies in China? In people’s minds, Lanzhou Ramen must contain beef and mutton. How come Shandong multigrain pancakes don’t have crispy fried noodles?

Fortunately, although there are no pictures next to each pizza, the ingredients are written in detail. It won't make me feel scared. I'm always afraid of ordering a pizza that's too greasy or has gorgonzola cheese. I think most cheeses in Italy are good, but I don’t like blue cheese, because the blue cheese on it is a kind of mold. I can’t get over this, and its taste is really weird, even though I have tried it a few times. , still unable to generate affection. But despite this, due to the different processing methods of the ingredients, I was still a little disappointed with the pickled anchovies in the pizza I ordered for the first time. The taste was so salty and bitter that when I bit into it, I couldn't help spitting out the fish meat and slurping it. The tongue makes a face.

As time goes by in Italy, I gradually become familiar with all kinds of pizza. I have eaten out a lot, so I am naturally familiar with it. But people always have their own preferences and think they are familiar with them. In fact, among the twenty or thirty kinds of pizza, there are only two or three types that are most commonly ordered. This inner sense of superiority that arises from thinking that you have an insight into the overall situation probably extends beyond ordering pizza. Therefore, we often have to reflect on ourselves, often put away the pretentiousness and arrogance in our hearts, return to life, observe every bit of reality, and observe it from a different perspective. We will realize the narrowness of our daily perspective, and gain a new life in stages.

To get back to the subject, through this way of self-examination of the soul, I really discovered the bits and pieces that I had missed in the past from ordinary things. It is not an exaggeration to say that I was searching for precious pearls in the sand.

For a while, a friend who decided to become a vegetarian showed me her recipe. I curiously glanced at her food list for the week and found it very novel. There are some foods that I can't imagine ordering, such as the vegetarian burger. As we all know, a burger is a beef patty with a refined bun. Another thing that makes me curious is that she can actually eat pizza marinara. The root word of pizza in Italian is mare, which means sea. According to my understanding, it is probably similar to Pizza Hut's seafood supreme pizza. How could it be vegetarian?

So I found the advertising flyer downstairs and found the column for this pizza. There is no seafood in its ingredients, but tomato sauce and a spice called pizza grass are added, which is very common in pizza making, and probably a little olive oil. It's so simple.

I think the taste is just mediocre. When I was in middle school, a small restaurant near the school sold seafood fried rice. The rice was filled with crab sticks and diced cuttlefish, which I still remember after graduation. So the uninspired "seafood" pizza made me feel like I had been thrown cold water on the disappointment.

This friend was my roommate, and I was still unconscious when I watched her munching on pizza. But that night, in my dream, the shadow of pizza always appeared. The dream was bizarre as follows: I dreamed that I was sitting in a small restaurant at the port, and the waiter brought me a seafood pizza with bright red shrimps in it. , and sardines. But in the blink of an eye, the shrimp and fish suddenly started to move! I took the knife and fork and was about to start, when I saw this scene and I was stunned. During this gap, fish and shrimps jumped into the sea one after another. So there was only red tomato sauce and pizza grass left on the pizza crust.

When I woke up the next day, I was really angry and funny when I recalled it. I thought that I was deeply poisoned by evidence and that I couldn’t live a peaceful life unless I understood some of the mysteries. So I turned on the computer, checked the information, and then threw it away - it turned out that the proper translation of this pizza should be sailor pizza, which originated in Naples. To be precise, it originated from the port of Naples. When the poor sailors came ashore, they often drank and ate pizza in small groups in the pizzeria. However, because they all lived a life-making life, they could only eat the simplest pizza and drink. Worst wine ever. This is the origin of pizza marinara.