2024-01-10 13:57:34
There is fighting on the Via dei Tribunali in Naples. It’s a fight for the pizza. It is being fought on two fronts. One is about who gets a table in a relevant pizzeria and when. On the other side, there is a fight about what the pizzaiolo (pizza maker) is allowed to put on the dough and what not: specifically, it’s currently about pineapple and ketchup. The fight on the second front line is a fundamental one. Since 2017, Pizza Napoletana has been part of UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage. Some say that it should be preserved according to a kind of purity law. Others counter that we need to develop and open up.
Matthias Rüb
Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.
The Via dei Tribunali leads straight through the old town of Naples. It was already a traffic axis with temples, squares and magnificent buildings in the Neapolis of the ancient Greeks. The Via dei Tribunali is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a material one of course, and has been since 1995, like the entire Centro Storico, the old town of Naples. The street, which in many places is an alley, one clogged with vans, cars and mopeds, pedestrians and tourists, is still lined today with temples (churches), squares and magnificent buildings such as the Castel Capuano at its eastern end, a former one Court building to which the Via dei Tribunali owes its current name.
The most famous – and now most controversial – pizza maker
The most famous and currently most controversial pizza maker on the Via dei Tribunali because of the pineapple and ketchup thing is Gino Sorbillo. The Neapolitan, born in 1974, is the third generation to run the original “Sorbillo” pizzeria together with his younger brother Toto in the house at number 32.
The Sede Storico, the motherhouse of the famous Pizzaiolo family, was opened in 1935 by Luigi Sorbillo and his wife Carolina Esposito. Gino Sorbillo’s grandparents were not only successful as innkeepers, but also as founders of a dynasty: all of their 21 children, so the story goes, became pizzaioli in their turn. The eldest daughter Ester (1929 to 2010) later achieved legendary status as Zia (aunt) Esterina. At the age of 14, she was already working in her parents’ pizzeria from morning to night. She is also considered to be the co-inventor of Pizza Fritta, the “poor sister” of the real Pizza Napoletana baked in a wood-fired oven.
In the barren years of the Second World War and immediately afterwards, when even tomatoes and mozzarella were rare and expensive, she had whatever ingredients were available cheaply placed on a piece of pizza dough and then fried the small dough pocket. Back then, anyone who was hungry but cash-strapped could at least afford a Pizza Fritta in the old town of Naples, or “oggi a otto” if necessary: eat today, pay in eight days.
He has built a small pizzeria empire
It can be disputed that Gino Sorbillo is really the best pizzaiolo in the dynasty today. And that’s what other members of the extended family, blessed with a Neapolitan temperament, do diligently, as they run their own pizzerias called “Sorbillo” on Via dei Tribunali and elsewhere. But it is undisputed that Gino Sorbillo is the most prominent and probably the most business-minded of all. In recent years he has built a small empire of pizzerias from Via dei Tribunali 32. First nationally from Genoa via Milan and Rome to Turin. It now extends to Ibiza, Miami and Tokyo.
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