The story of pizza in Philadelphia — from immigrant bakeries to modern Neapolitan.
Philadelphia's relationship with pizza is over a century old. It begins with the Southern Italian immigrants who settled in South Philadelphia in the late 1800s and early 1900s, who brought with them the bread-baking and pizza-making traditions of Campania, Sicily, and Calabria.
The result was the tomato pie — Philadelphia's original pizza contribution to American food culture. Made in bakeries, sold at room temperature, sauce applied on top. This tradition is still alive in the city today, carried by shops that have been open for fifty or sixty years.
The modern Neapolitan movement arrived later, in the early 2000s, as part of a national wave of interest in authentic Italian pizza-making techniques. Today, Philadelphia has serious practitioners of Neapolitan, New York, Detroit, and Sicilian styles — alongside the tomato pie tradition that predates all of them.