Pizza and the Long Lunch

Chiara closed the lab for the long Italian lunch at one o'clock. "The octopus needs a break too," she said. "And so do I. Come with me."

Polly perched on Chiara's shoulder, where her glasses rested neatly against the lab coat collar. Chiara walked out into the bright noon of the Villa Comunale park and turned uphill.

Naples at lunch was a city in its second wind. Shutters that had been closed against the late-morning heat were rolling up. Espresso bars were filling with men in suits and women on heels. The smell that had been salt and pine in the morning was now garlic and frying oil and tomato cooked over a high flame.

Chiara took her to a small pizzeria on a side street off the Riviera di Chiaia. The sign read DA MICHELE - SUCCURSALE. Inside, three men were working at a wood-burning oven that filled half the back wall. The fire was hot enough that Polly could feel it from the door.

A pizza in Naples is not what most of the world calls pizza. It is a Neapolitan pizza, made under specific rules that the city has guarded for two hundred years. The dough is flour, water, salt, and yeast, nothing else. The tomatoes are San Marzano, grown in volcanic soil on the slopes of Vesuvius. The cheese is fior di latte, fresh that morning. The basil is added at the end, raw. The oven runs at 485 degrees Celsius. The pizza cooks for ninety seconds.

The pizzaiolo, a heavy man with floured forearms, slid a margherita pizza onto a wooden peel and into the oven. Ninety seconds later he pulled it out. The crust had blistered into dark spots called leoparding. The cheese had melted into pale pools. The basil leaves were already starting to wilt in the residual heat.

The pizza was eaten without a knife, in folded quarters, with the hands. Chiara handed Polly a small piece of crust from her own slice. It was salty, charred where the leopard spots had formed, and almost weightless. Polly understood, in the first bite, why Naples had spent two centuries protecting this thing. The crust tasted of fire and bread and salt and the volcano on the far side of the bay.

Chiara ate her pizza in five quick folds and drank a small glass of mineral water with bubbles. Across the room, a man and his elderly mother were arguing affectionately about the football team. Outside, a Vespa puttered past.

"There is a theory," Chiara said, picking up the last leaf of basil, "that octopuses are smart because they are short-lived. They have to learn fast. We are smart because we are long-lived. We can afford to learn slowly. Pasta will learn everything she knows in maybe two more years. I will still be learning when I die." She put the basil in her mouth. "There is no judgement in this. It is only a thought."

They walked back to the institute slowly. The afternoon was warm. Polly perched on Chiara's shoulder, and the city moved around them at the unhurried pace of a Naples lunch hour that had not really ended yet, and would not really end until three.