TRAMONTI: A JOURNEY INTO THE PARADISE OF PIZZA

The smell of a freshly baked pizza reminds you of the bel paese. People from all over the world know this typical Italian dish but not everybody is aware that one of the most popular pizzas in the world is that of Tramonti, a small town of the Amalfi Coast.

by Annalisa Russo

Pizza is usually attributed to the city of Naples but the small town of Tramonti, nestled among the Lattari Mountains of the Amalfi Coast, is considered “the capital of pizza”. In fact, this is the only municipality in Italy whose pizza has been certificated as a local product.

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Pizza of Tramonti

The Pizza from Tramonti: an old tradition

Tramonti “the green lung” of the Amalfi Coast is famous for its food and wine resources and especially for its pizza, an excellent culinary delight that is different from the Neapolitan one because of its dough and the lowest cooking temperature that never goes beyond 350 degrees.

Pizza was born from the preparation of the rusk homemade by local families who had at their disposal an oven. This tradition is deeply rooted in the middle ages when in the rural ovens a small loaf of whole-wheat flour, proso millet, and barley with spices and lard was prepared and consumed immediately. Then, after the Second World War, there was the golden age. As a matter of fact, during the 1950s Luigi Giordano, a dairyman of Tramonti, who had opened in 1940 in the province of Novara a dairy to produce the fior di latte cheese which was still little known in the Northern regions, had an intuition: using the unsold mozzarella cheese adding it to pizzas. From that moment the success was guaranteed and a lot of people left the small town of Tramonti to try their luck as pizzaioli (people who make pizza) in the north of Italy and abroad. So today there are a lot of pizza restaurants managed by pizza makers from Tramonti (they are about 3,000) who since the Second World War have exported the culture of pizza throughout Italy and the world.

What makes this pizza so special?

The Tramonti pizza, with excellent products, is garnished with fior di latte cheese from the Lattari Mountains, the Re Fiascone or Corbarino tomato, and PDO oil from the hills of Salerno. This is considered the identity product of this small town that still today has preserved its authentic and traditional flavors. So, tasting this pizza made with whole-wheat flour and fennel, recreates flavors of the past.

If you love pizza and you are on the Amalfi Coast, you cannot leave without tasting the Tramonti one, made with genuine products and highly digestible: this is definitely one of the tastiest pizzas in the world. Today, the pizza restaurants have a lot of choices, what are you waiting for? Try it.

Tramonti hosts the pizza festival on August 8 and 9, whose dates remind the inauguration day of the following pizza restaurants: A’Marechiaro opened in Novara in 1953 and La Violetta, the first pizza restaurant of Tramonti opened in 1943.
It is said that pizza was born from bread, as a matter of fact in the past, people used to bake bread only after pizza, a useful practice to regulate the temperature of the oven.
On the 2nd of November, the Day of the Dead, people used to eat pizza nera (the black pizza) whose name comes from the black color associated with the mourning and the color of the typical Tramonti dough made of whole-wheat flour which is darker than the white one.