The 1889 Margherita Legend: What Actually Happened

Few food stories are told as often as this one. In 1889 the king and queen of Italy visit Naples, tire of French cooking and summon a famous pizzaiolo. Raffaele Esposito bakes three pizzas, including one in the red, white and green of the Italian flag: tomato, mozzarella and basil. The queen likes it best, and Esposito names it after her.

The record supports parts of that story and undermines others. Here is the story as told, the evidence on each side, and what remains open.

The story as told

The fullest version comes from the pizzeria at its center. Pizzeria Brandi, in Naples, says on its website that it began as “Pietro e Basta Così” (its history page traces that predecessor to 1780), that Raffaele Esposito was one of its cooks, and that in 1889 he “invented a particular type of pizza to honor Queen Margherita.” The pizzeria takes its name from Esposito’s wife, Maria Giovanna Brandi. Its proof is a thank-you letter dated June 1889 and signed by Galli Camillo, head of the royal household’s table services, thanking Esposito for his pizzas, and particularly “the one with tomato and mozzarella.”

Modernist Pizza tells the same story the way it usually circulates: the royal couple were in Naples during the Risanamento, the city’s urban-renewal campaign; Esposito prepared three pizzas; the queen declared the tomato, mozzarella and basil pizza her favorite; and the pizzeria, which still displays the letter, calls itself the home of the pizza Margherita.

What came before 1889

The ingredients weren’t new in 1889. Modernist Pizza’s timeline of written references lists:

• 1848. L’Omnibus Pittoresco, with the first mention it found of both tomato and mozzarella as pizza ingredients.
• 1851. A play, Pulcinella creduto Donna, that includes pizza with tomato sauce and mozzarella.
• 1858. Usi e costumi di Napoli e contorni, a book on Neapolitan customs, whose list of pizza toppings includes mozzarella, basil and tomato. The authors read it as a possible early description of the Margherita.

The 1858 passage is in an essay, “Il pizzajuolo,” signed by Emmanuele Rocco. It describes a range of pizzas rather than one recipe: the plainest with oil, oregano and garlic; others with grated cheese, lard and basil, to which thin slices of mozzarella are often added; and sometimes ham, tomatoes or clams. So mozzarella, basil and tomato were all part of the pizza maker’s repertoire decades before the royal story. Modernist Pizza’s authors go further and call the idea of an 1889 invention “plainly false.”

Even the AVPN, the Naples association that sets rules for Neapolitan pizza, puts the dish before the name. Its rulebook says the first “tomato and mozzarella” pizzas appeared in the 1700s and were “later called ‘Margherita’ in 1889” during the royal visit. Modernist Pizza notes that the AVPN gives other early dates, too, without citing evidence.

The letter

The letter is the only document that ties Esposito, the queen and the name together, which is why Zachary Nowak, a food historian, went looking for its trail. His article, “Folklore, Fakelore, History: Invented Tradition and the Origins of the Pizza Margherita,” appeared in the journal Food, Culture & Society in March 2014. His case rests on three kinds of evidence, as his paper and Modernist Pizza’s account of it set out:

• No record of sending it. Nowak searched 19th-century archives and found 24 records dated June 11, 1889, the date on the Pizzeria Brandi letter, but nothing from Galli addressed to Esposito.
• The seal. The royal seal is stamped rather than preprinted, unlike other royal letters he found; it is off-center and crooked; and it doesn’t match other examples.
• The handwriting. It looks different from other letters written by Galli.

From the seal, the missing record and the handwriting together, Nowak concluded that the letter is a forgery. He also points out that it addresses Esposito by his wife’s surname, Brandi, which Scott Wiener of Scott’s Pizza Tours, summarizing the paper in 2014, calls very out of the ordinary.

Who made it is a separate question. Nowak proposed that the Brandi brothers, Esposito’s in-laws, who took charge of the pizzeria in the 1930s, commissioned or created the letter as publicity during the Great Depression. That is his hypothesis; their authorship hasn’t been independently established.

Where the story came from

Nowak doesn’t argue that the Brandis invented the legend from nothing. Modernist Pizza summarizes the pieces it was built from:

• Esposito’s own branding. In 1871, when he ran a wine and liquor shop, he sought and was granted permission to display the royal seal. When he bought the pizzeria in 1883, he named it Pizzeria della Regina d’Italia, the Pizzeria of the Queen of Italy.
• Earlier royal pizza stories. An 1880 newspaper story has Queen Margherita summoning a pizzaiolo to the court; his name was Giovanni Brandi, Esposito’s father-in-law. Modernist Pizza’s timeline finds it in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette, years before the date on the letter, and an 1884 New-York Tribune piece that mentions the queen’s favor toward a pizzaiolo in Castellammare.
• Later variants. Similar stories surfaced in 1914 about a different pizzaiolo, and in 1935 about an event in 1882 or 1883.

In Nowak’s reconstruction, as Modernist Pizza reports it, the story’s makers took real facts, the ancestor’s permission to use the royal seal and the pizzeria’s name, and worked them into an existing legend of royals eating commoners’ food.

Modernist Pizza’s authors add their own doubts: a royal eating food made by a commoner was unlikely, “especially during a cholera epidemic.” They also consider the theory that the royal court invented the story to make Neapolitan food a symbol of the new nation, and conclude from the letter’s details that the royals had little to do with it.

The other side

Pizzeria Brandi hasn’t accepted any of this. Modernist Pizza reports that its current owners maintain the letter and the story are genuine, and the pizzeria’s website still tells the 1889 story as fact (checked October 14, 2026).

What neither side has produced is a document from 1889 showing that the pizza was called “Margherita” then. The legend may contain a germ of truth, as Modernist Pizza allows: the queen may have liked this pizza. But there is no evidence that it was invented that year.

The Margherita today

However it got its name, the Margherita is now written into rules. The EU’s 2010 specification for Pizza Napoletana TSG describes a Margherita of 60 to 80 g of crushed peeled tomatoes, 80 to 100 g of Mozzarella di Bufala Campana or Mozzarella STG, fresh basil and 4 to 5 g of extra-virgin olive oil. The AVPN’s current rules give 60 to 80 g of tomato, 80 to 100 g of buffalo mozzarella or fior di latte, a few basil leaves, 6 to 7 g of oil and optional grated hard cheese. The differences between the two standards are covered in Inside the AVPN standard.

A home oven can’t bake to either standard, but it can make a very good Margherita with a wetter dough and a longer bake. The method is in the home-oven Margherita and Neapolitan pizza at home. The Pizza Calculator starts a 12-inch Neapolitan-style pizza at 73 to 109 g of cheese, in line with both standards. For the American side of the founding-myth problem, see Lombardi’s 1905, and for where Neapolitan pizza sits among other styles, the Pizza Style Atlas.

Sources

• Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1: pages 10–11 (timeline of written references to pizza, including 1848, 1851, 1858, 1880 and 1884), page 14 (Usi e costumi di Napoli and Rocco’s essay, AVPN dates without evidence), page 17 (Rocco on how pizza was made, tomatoes as a topping) and page 23 (“The Real Story of Pizza Margherita,” including its account of Nowak’s findings and quotations from his article).
• Zachary Nowak, “Folklore, Fakelore, History: Invented Tradition and the Origins of the Pizza Margherita,” Food, Culture & Society 17, no. 1 (March 2014): 103–124, DOI 10.2752/175174414X13828682779249 (the archival search, seal and handwriting evidence, the wife’s-surname observation, and his hypothesis about who made the letter). Author’s full-text upload. Checked October 14, 2026.
• Emmanuele Rocco, “Il pizzajuolo,” in Usi e costumi di Napoli e contorni descritti e dipinti, volume 2 (Naples, 1858), pages 123–127; the toppings passage is on page 124. Read from the RCIN digital library scan. Checked October 14, 2026.
• Scott Wiener, “Today is the 125th Anniversary of the Pizza Margherita Myth,” Scott’s Pizza Tours, June 11, 2014. Checked October 14, 2026.
• Pizzeria Brandi: home page and history page. Checked October 14, 2026.
• Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana: International Regulations (Disciplinare), English edition, article 4.1 (historical references) and 4.2 (Margherita). Checked October 14, 2026.
• Commission Regulation (EU) No 97/2010, Annex II (Pizza Napoletana TSG specification, garnish), read on legislation.gov.uk. Checked October 14, 2026.