Storia facile in italiano sulla pizza preferita

What does “pizza Margherita” mean in Italian?

The Margherita is the plainest of the famous pizzas: just tomato, mozzarella and fresh basil. Those three colours — red, white and green — happen to match the Italian flag. The popular story says a Naples pizza maker built it in 1889 for Queen Margherita and named it after her, though historians now doubt that tale. There’s a second layer too: “margherita” is also the ordinary Italian word for a daisy.

In the story, Luca orders pizza every Friday and says, “Io scelgo sempre la pizza margherita” — “I always choose the Margherita.” He calls it “una pizza semplice, ma molto famosa” (a simple but very famous pizza) made of “pomodoro, mozzarella e basilico.” The name traces to the 1889 legend of pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito and Queen Margherita of Savoy in Naples; the red-white-green is read as the tricolore. Recent research questions the royal story, but the name stuck. Note the everyday sense: a margherita is a daisy, and ordering “una margherita” at a pizzeria simply means this pizza — no capital letter needed when you say it.