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Food

Naples Is Trying to Make the World’s Longest Pizza

The people of Naples are planning to make a two-kilometer-long pizza. That’s a pizza that is one mile and a quarter long.
Foto via Flickr-brugeren Sami Keinänen

Naples, Italy is a distinctive place for many reasons. It is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on the globe. It was the most bombed Italian city during World War II. And if the people of Naples have their way, on May 15, Naples will become the record holder for the world's longest pizza.

The people of Naples are planning to make a two-kilometer-long pizza. That's a pizza that is one mile and a quarter long.

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That's a pizza even mutated turtles would have trouble finishing.

"It's absolutely a point of pride for our city, which is the home of pizza," said Alessandro Marinacci of Napoli Pizza Village, a local organization which, along with Caputo, the local flour company, is organizing the event.

Why make a mile-plus-long pizza? To beat the current record held by Milan's Expo, of course. That pizza that was 1,595 meters (5,232 feet) long and was made last year.

READ MORE: I Traveled to Naples to Trace the Roots of the Dollar Slice

The city of Naples is pretty much synonymous with pizza. Naples claims that the Margherita pizza was first baked there for the Bourbon Queen Regina Margherita in 1889. In fact, Italy recently applied to have the pizza of Naples listed on Unesco's Intangible Cultural Heritage list, which is a list of cultural "practices and expressions [that] help demonstrate the diversity of the heritage [of humanity] and raise awareness about its importance."

Naturally, the ridiculously long pizza that will be baked this May will be made in the Neapolitan style—unlike that Milan Expo imposter.

Making a very long pizza is not easy. "For the attempt we have custom designed five motorized wood-burning stoves on wheels," Marinacci told The Local. A team of hundreds of pizza chefs will converge on Naples and work for 11 hours to create the masterpiece. It is expected that the finished pizza will be a little over a foot wide. Two tons of flour, two tons of mozzarella, 50,000 ounces of tomato, 50 gallons of oil, and 66 pounds of fresh basil will be used to make it.

Breaking pizza-baking records in Italy, however, is no easy feat. It seems that as soon as a record is made, it is broken. The current Milan record broke the previous record—a 4,000-foot-long pizza—which was in place for just a week.

The question remains: Who gets to eat this pizza? Maybe the people of Naples would like to donate their handiwork to deprived people of other countries, who have to contend with only round pizzas, or very short square ones.