A Pizza Experience in Florence, Italy

Every Italian city has its pizza technique. Here is a Florentine pizza review.

ITALY GALLERY

6/19/20253 min read

If you ever tried searching the internet for “The Best Pizza in Florence, Italy”, chances are you would get laundry lists of websites proclaiming the Best in Florence. But, what is “best”? It depends entirely upon the consumer. While in Florence, we opened four webpage blogs and began reading their list of pizza recommendations. Several restaurants showed up on all four lists, so we read the description and chose Giotta Pizzeria based upon the description of the dough and style of pizza, because pizza in Italy also comes in many styles. Come to find out after we had our meal, Giotta Pizzeria has been named in several national magazines over the last few years.

From our experiences in Italy, pizza comes in one size (about 14 in) and you never ask to add or subtract toppings like we do in America. The pizza arrives whole and usually is eaten by one person. Now, if you think the “best” pizza is a Hawaiian or Combination style pizza, I need to stop you and ask that you find a different article to read on our BLOG. Besides that, any good Italian would chastise you greatly for putting pineapple on a pizza and you probably are not going to appreciate the ingredients I am about to describe.

At Giotta’s we chose two pies.

  1. Capricciosa: “Napoli” mozzarella cheese, cooked ham, salami, porchini mushrooms, roasted artichoke, “taggioasca” olive powder, semi-dried tomatoes, basil, and “Fontana Lupo” extra virgin olive oil.

  2. Bronte: “Napoli” mozzarella cheese, Parmigiano Reggiano “DOP” 24 months, mortadella, ricotta cheese, pistacchio cream, chopped pistacchios, lemon zeste, and “Fontana Lupo” extra virgin olive oil.

From a broad scope, pizza #1 had ingredients any of us would recognize (cheese, ham, salami, mushrooms, tomatoes, etc.). Now look carefully at the photo. The artichoke was the size of a small fist and had NOT been kept in a vinegar barrel for years, nor was it mushy in the mouth. A porcini mushroom is one of the best you can eat with it’s earthy back flavor. But to us, the star of the show was the ingredient neither of us had ever heard “taggioasca” which is an olive powder.

And to top off the uniqueness of the Giotta Pizzeria, we were given gold scissors to cut the pizza to share the flavors. While waiting for our pizza we even watched the cutting methods of the locals around us. These were not our first pizzas in Italy and surely will not be our last. However, to date, they comprised the most unique ingredients, and we look forward to trying many more flavor combinations.

We simply said YUMMMM to that olive powder.

As for pizza #2, no one we know would EVER dream of putting peanut butter on a pizza. So, why would a culture of pizza pineapple haters choose to add nut butter to pizza? Looking at the ingredients separately, the aged Parmigiano Reggiano “DOP” was bold, the mortadella meat was delicate, the lemon was sharp in contrast to the smooth ricotta. Pistachio in Italy can be found in foods from cookies to coffee, sandwiches to desserts, so a bit of chopped pistachio on pizza lends to a textural change for the mouth. But the pistachio cream on this pizza, with the same nutty-salty notes as peanut butter, created a beautiful dance with the ricotta and was, oddly, fantastic.

The long history of Taggiasca olives begins in Taggia, a small town of 14,000 inhabitants in the province of Imperia. Here the monks of San Colombano from the monastery of Lerins transplanted the olive trees of their land of origin, giving rise to a new type of cultivar that soon met a huge fortune: the taggiasca.

Although today this variety is cultivated in different areas of Italy and even in California, only the original Taggia olive can boast the DOP (Protected Origin) certification, proof of the exceptional quality closely linked to the perfect combination of soil, water and climate.