Italy may be famous for its pizza, but Ancient Romans never had a chance to have a slice. And yet, on a frescoed wall in Pompeii, archaeologists have uncovered what appears to be an early relative of the ubiquitous food: a flatbread focaccia topped with spices, pesto, pomegranate, and a date.
The recently uncovered fresco was located in the atrium of a home attached to a bakery. In other rooms, archaeologists recently uncovered the skeletons of three people working near the oven. Like the rest of Pompeii, the site was frozen in time with the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It is part of the Pompeii Archaeological Park.
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The “pizza” rests on a silver tray alongside a wine goblet, dried fruit, and a garland. The scene depicts a Roman take on Ancient Greek xenia hospitality gifts, according to a research paper published yesterday, June 27, by historian Alessandro Russo and archaeologist Gabriel Zuchtriegel in the Scavi di Pompeii online journal. Around 300 xenia images have been unearthed in the region.
“Though it looks like a pizza, this image from a Pompeian painting from 2,000 years ago obviously can’t be so, since some of the most characteristic ingredients are missing, namely tomatoes and mozzarella,” reads a press statement by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.
While the newly discovered flatbread seems to have functioned as a tray for its toppings, it bears some resemblance to a particularly famous piece of food — the so-called “Herculean loaf.” Shortly before Mount Vesuvius erupted, an Ancient Roman baker placed the dough into an oven in the town of Herculaneum, near Pompeii. The bread remained in that oven until 1930 when it was discovered carbonized and intact. The famous gluten is now in the collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.
That loaf was made from regular wheat and spelt flour, salt, water, and sourdough starter. Similar focaccia-style breads, such as the one depicted in the fresco, may have included olive oil and spices.
While Ancient Romans ate cheese, they didn’t have the exact ingredients to make a modern-day pizza. Mozzarella wasn’t introduced until later, and it took more than a millennium and a half for Italians to start eating tomatoes, which were brought over from the Americas by European colonizers. The tomato plant, a crop cultivated by the Aztecs, was documented in Italy by 1548, but it took even longer for people in Italy to start eating the fruit: The first known tomato sauce recipe is from 1694.
In recent years, ongoing excavations across Italy and Pompeii have unearthed remnants of Ancient Roman foods and shed light on the dining culture of the society. Last year, archaeologists in Rome found stone fruit, olives, meat, nuts, and similar forms of “pizza” in the sewers of the Colosseum, suggesting that Ancient Roman spectators were snacking as they gazed at grisly fights on the arena floor. In 2019, researchers uncovered a “fast food counter” in Pompeii frequented by lower-class Ancient Romans who could not afford a home kitchen.
Source: Hyperallergic.com