Pizza is one of those foods that seems so familiar that we forget it has a story.

Long before pizza became what we recognize today, people throughout the Mediterranean were eating flatbreads topped with simple ingredients. But Naples became the place where modern pizza truly found its identity. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the city’s working people were eating inexpensive flatbreads topped with things like tomatoes, garlic, oil, and eventually cheese — simple food made from what was available, eaten because it was delicious, practical, and affordable.

And then there is the famous Margherita.

Tradition tells us that in 1889, during a visit to Naples by Queen Margherita of Savoy, pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito prepared a pizza topped with tomato, mozzarella, and basil — red, white, and green, the colors of the Italian flag — and named it Pizza Margherita in her honor. Food historians have debated the details of that story, but I almost don’t mind. What has endured is the pizza itself: tomato, mozzarella, basil, dough. Nothing unnecessary. And perhaps that simplicity tells us more about Italian cooking than the legend ever could.

I came to understand that kind of simplicity when I spent time in Italy.

I studied in Bologna while earning my homeopathic master’s degree, traveling there for weeks at a time, and along the way I had the great privilege of eating truly exceptional pizza — the kind that quietly resets your understanding of what pizza can be. I had grown up loving pizza in America, but what I discovered in Italy was something altogether different.

And even in Italy, pizza is not simply pizza.

Travel from one region to another and the crust itself can change. Roman pizza can be thin and crisp. Other Italian traditions produce thicker or more bread-like pizzas. But Naples is famous for something I particularly love: that wonderfully inflated outer rim, the cornicione, filled with irregular pockets of air surrounding a softer, thinner center.

That crust is half the experience for me.

When a beautifully fermented Neapolitan-style dough hits intense heat, the rim seems to come alive. It swells almost before your eyes, blistering and ballooning into these enormous pockets of air. I still get excited watching it happen through the oven door. You can already imagine biting through that crisp, blistered exterior into the soft, airy interior.

It is bread and pizza at the same time.

And then there is American pizza, which became its own collection of traditions. New York pizza is wonderful in an entirely different way — broad, thinner slices with a crisp yet flexible crust made for folding and eating with your hands. Chicago deep-dish goes almost to the opposite extreme: substantial, deeply baked and almost casserole-like, with a thick crust carrying generous layers of sauce and toppings.

I love that about pizza. There isn’t really one pizza.

There are families of pizza, shaped by place, people, ovens, ingredients, and tradition.

When I was in Italy, being vegan often meant ordering mine without cheese. Instead, I might have arugula — rocket, as it’s called there — mushrooms, fresh tomatoes, or simply tomato sauce and vegetables. What surprised me was how little I missed having a mountain of cheese on top. When the dough is that good, you don’t need much.

The crust carries the experience.

That lesson followed me home.

Over time, I found my own way back to the pizzas I remembered by making a long-fermented sourdough dough and keeping the toppings deliberately simple. A light layer of tomato sauce. Beautiful fresh tomatoes when I have them. Spoonfuls of my homemade ricotta. Sometimes a little vegan mozzarella. Fresh basil. Good olive oil.

That’s enough.

In America, pizza seems to occupy two completely different worlds. At one extreme is highly processed fast-food pizza, something we have almost come to think of as the definition of junk food. At the other is an entire world of artisan bakers obsessing over flour, fermentation, hydration, ovens, tomatoes, and the mysterious behavior of dough.

I definitely belong to the second group.

Especially as a sourdough baker, I love that making great pizza requires both knowledge and restraint. The dough itself is extraordinarily simple: flour, water, sourdough starter, and salt. There isn’t much there to hide behind. What transforms those few ingredients is fermentation and time.

My dough rests for 24, 48, sometimes 72 hours. It slowly develops flavor and structure while I do essentially nothing at all.

Then I top it with foods that still look like themselves — tomatoes, basil, olive oil, homemade ricotta. For me, that’s an entirely different way of thinking about pizza. It feels like beautiful bread made into a meal.

Learning to work with a very high-hydration pizza dough did take some practice. Wet dough can seem impossible when you first meet it. It sticks to everything. It spreads. It refuses to behave the way you think dough ought to behave.

And then one day you understand it.

You stop fighting it.

You learn to fold instead of knead, to use wet hands rather than more flour, and most importantly, to preserve all that beautiful air the fermentation worked so hard to create. Once you understand that, I actually think this pizza is easier than making a loaf of artisan sourdough bread.

And there is something wonderfully convenient hiding inside all of that slow fermentation. I can make the dough, divide it into balls, put them in the refrigerator, and suddenly I have the beginnings of several beautiful meals waiting for me over the next few days.

One pizza for us. One to share. One waiting for tomorrow.

Take out a dough ball, let it relax, crush a few tomatoes, gather whatever beautiful toppings are around, and dinner can become something extraordinary with surprisingly little effort.

Maybe that’s part of why I love this pizza so much. It contains two things that might seem contradictory: patience and ease.

You give it time when you have time, and later it gives some of that time back to you.

And when I pull one from the oven, scatter fresh basil across the top and drizzle it with olive oil, I am never entirely standing in my own kitchen anymore.

For just a moment, I’m back in Italy.

I’m walking toward a little pizzeria, excited to sit down and order an authentic pizza. I’m remembering those extraordinary days when eating pizza in Italy wasn’t something I was dreaming about doing someday.

I was actually there.

Maybe that’s why I could eat this pizza at almost any hour — dinner, lunch, even breakfast the next morning. It’s delicious, certainly. But food is rarely only about taste.

Sometimes a crust filled with air, a ripe tomato, a few leaves of basil, and a drizzle of olive oil can carry you thousands of miles.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky, bread doesn’t just hold you together. It carries you home.