World's Longest Pizza (1.8 km) Prepared in Naples Italy

It took over 100 chefs in Napoli, Italia to prepare the world's longest pizza, measuring at 1.8 km (just over 1 mile).

It took 3,300 pounds of sauce. (oh yeah)

Fun story about pizza (from wiki):

In 16th century Naples, a Galette flatbread was referred to as a pizza. Known as the dish for poor people, it was sold in the street and was not considered a kitchen recipe for a long time. This was later replaced by oil, tomatoes (after Europeans came into contact with the Americas) or fish. In 1843, Alexandre Dumas, père, described the diversity of pizza toppings. An often recounted story holds that on 11 June 1889, to honour the Queen consort of Italy, Margherita of Savoy, the Neapolitan pizzamaker Raffaele Esposito created the "Pizza Margherita", a pizza garnished with tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil, to represent the national colours of Italy as on the Italian flag.

Pizza is now a type of bread and tomato dish, often served with cheese. However, until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, the dish was sweet, not savory, and earlier versions which were savory more resembled the flat breads now known as schiacciata. Pellegrino Artusi's classic early twentieth century cookbook, La Scienza in cucina e l'Arte di mangiar bene gives three recipes for pizza, all of which are sweet. However, by 1927, Ada Boni's collection of regional cooking includes a recipe using tomatoes and mozzarella.

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I particularly likes this story because it shows how food, which is obviously a huge part of Italian culture, helped to bring different nationalities and cultures together. That's what it's all about, isn't it?

Also - and this is obviously a superficial explanation - during the Risorgimento (Resurgence) a political and social movement of Italian history in which the people looked to unite the various states that existed in Italy (Kingdom of Venice, Kingdom of Two Sicilies, The Papal States, etc.), food played a big role. 1861 marked the year in which there was an official declaration of the Kingdom of Italy (though the finalized unification would not occur until 1871 in Rome).

There were many, many different dialects in Italy, and one of the main ideas behind the unification was a common and shared language. Recipes helped to bridge this gap. Dialects in the south and north were very different, but they were able to decipher (more or less) the differences through recipes. If you know that parsley goes in a dish, but don't know how to say it in another dialect, look at a recipe that calls for parsley and boom!

I think that is so cool. Food is not only a huge part in Italian culture nowadays, but also played a role in the unification of the country as a whole.

Please correct me if I got some things wrong, and add stuff if you can!

Pizza ftw.