Italy may be famous for its pizza, but the ancient Romans never had a chance to have a slice of it. And yet, on a frescoed wall in Pompeii, archaeologists have discovered what appears to be an early relative of the ubiquitous food: a flatbread focaccia topped with spices, pesto, pomegranate and a date.
The recently discovered fresco was located in the atrium of a house adjoining a bakery. In other rooms, archaeologists recently discovered the skeletons of three people working near the oven. Like the rest of Pompeii, the site was frozen in time with the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. It is part of the Pompeii Archaeological Park.
The “pizza” sits on a silver tray next to a wine glass, dried fruit and a garland. The scene depicts a Roman version of ancient Greece xenia hospitality gifts, according to a research paper published yesterday, June 27, by historian Alessandro Russo and archaeologist Gabriel Zuchtriegel in the Scavi from Pompeii online review. Around 300 xenia images were discovered in the region.
“Although it looks like a pizza, this image of a Pompeian painting from 2,000 years ago obviously cannot be, because some of the most characteristic ingredients are missing, namely tomatoes and mozzarella” , reads a press release from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.
While the newly discovered flatbread appears to have functioned as a platter for its toppings, it resembles a particularly famous piece of food – the so-called “Herculean bread”. Shortly before Vesuvius erupted, an ancient Roman baker placed the dough in an oven in the town of Herculaneum, near Pompeii. The bread remained in this oven until 1930 when it was discovered charred and intact. The famous gluten is now part of the collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.
This bread was made from common wheat and spelled flour, salt, water and leaven. Similar focaccia-style loaves, like the one depicted in the mural, may have included olive oil and spices.
As the ancient Romans ate cheese, they didn’t have the exact ingredients to make a modern pizza. Mozzarella was not introduced until later, and it took Italians more than a millennium and a half to get started eat tomatoes, imported from the Americas by European colonizers. The tomato plant, a plant cultivated by the Aztecs, was documented in Italy in 1548, but it took even longer for Italians to start eating the fruit: the first known recipe for tomato sauce dates from 1694.
In recent years, ongoing excavations across Italy and Pompeii have unearthed remains of ancient Roman dishes and shed light on the society’s culinary culture. Last year, archaeologists in Rome find stone fruits, olives, meat, nuts and similar forms of “pizza” in the sewers of the Colosseum, suggesting that spectators in ancient Rome snacked as they watched grisly fights on the arena floor. In 2019, researchers discovered a “fast food counter” in Pompeii frequented by lower-class ancient Romans who could not afford home cooking.
