The Real Reason 19th-Century Elites Hated Pizza

When mid-19th-century travelers wrote home about the street food of Naples, their descriptions were rarely appetizing. Samuel Morse famously dismissed early Neapolitan pizza as a “species of the most nauseating cake,” while Pinocchio author Carlo Collodi remarked that its appearance gave off an “air of elaborate filth.” Modern accounts often treat these biting reviews as quaint culinary critiques of an unrefined street snack. But isolating the food from its physical environment creates an historical blind spot. The elite disgust for early pizza was never an evaluation of flavor but a visceral reaction to systemic squalor, public health panic, and extreme urban poverty. The hatred the upper classes had for pizza was a reaction to its status as the fuel of a desperate underclass surviving in the shadow of cholera and open sewers.

**The Macaroni Spectacle:** This famous 1873 archival photograph by Giorgio Sommer, titled “The Spaghetti Eaters,” captures the raw, public reality of the Neapolitan street economy.

The Slumming Phenomenon: Why Wealthy Travelers Documented the Street Food of Naples

Why would a wealthy American intellectual like Samuel Morse, or an affluent Italian writer like Carlo Collodi, be visiting the poorest, most destitute sectors of Naples in the first place, let alone eating the food of “peasants”? The answer requires pulling back the lens on the profoundly cynical 19th-century social practice of “slumming.” Long before it became a documented phenomenon in the crowded tenements of New York City, venturing into areas of extreme urban squalor was a recognized form of upper-class entertainment. Wealthy elites didn’t just stumble into the packed alleys of Naples by accident. They went there as poverty tourists for the explicit purpose of gawking at the underclass. It was a voyeuristic exercise designed to treat human desperation as a theatrical backdrop, and the visitors went there expecting to witness a “poor show.”

When these elite travelers described street pizza as revolting or nauseating, they were fulfilling the purpose of their trip. Their physical disgust was a signal that they got exactly what they expected out of the trip. It was, in fact, the psychological payoff of the excursion, allowing them to project an air of moral and civilized superiority over the people they were observing. They were entirely blind to the material reality of the food before them. To the lazzaroni, Naples’ pizza was a vital economic buffer against literal starvation. It was cheap, calorie-dense, and deeply integrated into a localized, informal credit system known as the pizza a otto (pizza by eight). A manual laborer could consume a basic lard, garlic, and salt pizza from a vendor to fuel a day of work, and they were given a full eight days to secure the fraction of a coin required to settle the debt.

To an elite tourist looking for a sensory thrill, this ingenious survival infrastructure was invisible. They didn’t see a community using localized economics to resist starvation. To them, the scene was just a mass of unwashed people consuming flat dough wrapped in paper in an area where sewage ran through the streets.

The Cholera Variable and Microbial Terror

Samuel Morse’s description of the pizza he at in Naples is an absolute poster-child for the attitude of 19th-centry slumming literature. He described it as a “…species of the most nauseating cake…with its surface greasy with pieces of tomato, and sprinkled with little fish and black pepper, and I know not what other ingredients. It altogether looks like a piece of bread that had been taken reeking out of the sewer.”

There is a deeply sinister context behind 19th-century descriptions of pizza looking like it was “reeking out of the sewer.” Throughout the 1800s, Naples was repeatedly devastated by catastrophic waterborne cholera epidemics, culminating in the horrific outbreak of 1884. During this era, the mechanisms of contagion were terrifyingly misunderstood, but the connection between crowded slums and agonizing death was undeniably clear. Street food vendors operated entirely in the open air, blocks away from anything resembling clean, pressurized running water or modern sanitation.

When an elite traveler looked at a street pizza vendor, their reaction was governed by acute microbial terror. Street vendors operated entirely in the open air, blocks away from clean running water or basic sanitation. Samuel Morse and his peers traveled into these destitute sectors expecting to see disease, filth, and destitution. Writing home that a local flatbread looked like it was “taken reeking out of the sewer” had little to do with culinary critique and everything to do with expressing their revulsion. The pizza became an emotional proxy for the unwashed city itself. To the wealthy, this was like a game of Russian roulette.

The Material Reality: The Vital Economics of Low-Cost Ingredients

To fully separate the historical record from the realm of elite travelogues and place it into material reality, we must look at what actually went onto a 19th-century street pizza. When Samuel Morse complained about a greasy surface sprinkled with “little fish and black pepper,” he was unknowingly describing an efficient, low-cost preservation solution. The ingredients of the lazzaroni pizza were governed entirely by commodity economics, shelf-life extensions, and the absolute necessity of cheap caloric density.

A authentic mid-19th-century street pizza consisted of four primary material components, each serving a distinct economic function:

The Fat Profile (Lard vs. Olive Oil): While modern consumers associate pizza with olive oil, the baseline fat for the Neapolitan working class was strutto (pork lard). Lard was vastly cheaper than high-grade olive oil, packed double the stable caloric energy, and acted as a heavy moisture barrier. Smearing dense pork fat onto the raw dough prevented the wet toppings from immediately soaking into the starch matrix during the bake, keeping the pie structurally intact on an open-air street cart.
The Protein (Cecenielli and Anchovies): The “little fish” that offended Morse were typically cecenielli—microscopic, white bait fish that were too small to be sold to regular fishmongers or restaurants. Because they were essentially a commercial byproduct, pizza vendors could buy them for fractions of a cent. Heavily salted anchovies were also deployed because the extreme sodium content acted as a powerful ambient preservative, preventing the fish from spoiling on a wooden plank in the humid, unrefrigerated Neapolitan heat.
The Dairy (Aged Grated Cheese): Fresh mozzarella was an expensive, highly perishable luxury in the early 1800s. Instead, street vendors used cheap, heavily aged, hard sheep’s milk cheeses like Pecorino, or sour scraps left over from cheese production. Shaving a dry, high-sodium cheese over the lard provided a sharp punch of flavor and fat that could withstand days of storage without spoiling.
The Herbs and Spices (Garlic, Oregano, and Black Pepper): Pungent aromatics like garlic and oregano weren’t just regional preferences; they were natural antimicrobial agents. More importantly, their aggressive flavor profiles were explicitly used to mask the off-notes of slightly oxidized fats or stale dough. Black pepper, which Morse singled out, was an essential top-note because it provided a sharp heat that simulated a satisfying, warming fullness for a worker who might not eat another meal for twenty-four hours.

Dissecting the actual components of a 19th-century Neapolitan street pizza reveals an ingenious piece of working-class survival engineering. Every single ingredient was chosen because it resisted spoilage in the open air, maximized physical caloric stamina for brutal manual labor, and cost fractions of a cent to source. It was an extraordinarily efficient food system designed by and for a population living on the edge of survival. This reality was completely lost on upper-class spectators who judged it solely by the poverty of its surroundings.

The Avant-Garde Mirror: Walter Benjamin and the Romance of Porosity

The danger of treating isolated essays, journals, or letters as the essence of historical research becomes crystal clear when we realize that a traveler’s description tells us everything about their own cultural lens, and nothing about material reality. All too often food history relies on finding a single colorful quote and building a superficial timeline around it. For instance, one digital content creator built an entire episode around Samuel Morse’s visceral disgust. But what if they had stumbled onto the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s 1924 writings on Naples instead?

In his accounts, Benjamin describes the vibrant, theatrical spectacle of Neapolitan street vendors selling long strands of spaghetti that the locals ate entirely with their bare hands. This is all too easy to treat as a whimsical culinary novelty or perhaps a story about the “quaint history of finger-food pasta.” A true examiation requires us to look beyond these personal diaries to analyze the material infrastructure. The working-class lazzaroni didn’t eat spaghetti with their hands to satisfy a bohemian cultural tradition but because they lived in conditions of extreme systemic abandonment, packed into tenements without domestic kitchens, tables, or basic utensils. The street chaos that Benjamin romanticized as avant-garde “porosity” was just the survival strategy of a population forced into public spaces to avoid starvation, a desperate reality completely sanitized by modern commodity media outlets who continue to market this human tragedy as a whimsical Neapolitan street food spectacle.

Beyond Pizza: The Macaroni Spectacle and the Human Zoo

Pizza was not an isolated street oddity; it was one half of an entire hand-to-mouth survival ecosystem that elite travelers converted into open-air entertainment. The other half was street macaroni.

Throughout the 19th century, affluent Grand Tour diarists documented the spectacle of the lazzaroni eating long strands of un-sauced spaghetti directly with their bare hands. In travelogues by figures like American lecturer John Lawson Stoddard, tourists described tossing copper coins into crowds to watch locals make a “mad dash” to grab handfuls of scalding pasta and drop them down their throats. Later commentators, including philosopher Walter Benjamin in the 1920s, would romanticize this public consumption as a quaint, bohemian theatricality.

The reality was far darker. Neapolitans did not eat pasta with their fingers to entertain tourists. They did so because the working class lived in hyper-congested, single-room ground-floor tenements called bassi, spaces completely devoid of kitchens, hearths, tables, or metal cutlery. Furthermore, the reliance on cheap, mass-produced pasta was the consequence of catastrophic economic mismanagement under Spanish Viceroy rule centuries earlier, which priced meat, fresh greens, and diverse agriculture entirely out of reach.

Just as with pizza, the low-grade street macaroni was flavored with whatever industrial waste the poor could salvage, such as rancid pork fat, boiled cabbage stalks swept off market floors, sour rejected cheeses, and scrap baitfish. When wealthy foreign travelers tossed coins to watch starving human beings choke down cheap starch in the gutter, they were treating systemic destitution as a human zoo.