Just a reminder — since 2017, the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii (which was infamously buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE) has undergone extensive excavations in several new areas. And in “Regio IX” this week, the first scholarly analysis of this painting appeared, and the interwebs are all a-flutter as to what this still-life depicts: could it be the forerunner of pizza?
Here, you see a silver wine cup on a tray which also has a flat “focaccia”-esque bread, which holds fruits (pomegranate and perhaps a date), spices, and perhaps even a sort of pesto. Missing, of course, are the key ingredients of pizza, mozzarella and tomato sauce. (And of course we know that tomatoes didn’t make their way into Italy until after the late 15th or 16th centuries.)
But maybe this painting demonstrates that putting various foods on top of a flatbread was a sort of pre-pizza practice, and that is cool. A bit of context here: the area this painting comes from was an atrium of a house that abutted a bakery, which had had an oven in Roman times, so it makes sense to have baked food items portrayed here.
Also cool is that the still-life proto-pizza isn’t a random subject, but one that arose because it falls into the genre known as “xenia,” which can be roughly translated as “hospitality.” In the Ancient Greco-Roman worlds, xenia was expected to be found when outsiders travelled. The host would feed and make wandering outsiders feel welcome, and in return the guest would be extremely respectful to the host, and hopefully regale the household with whom they were staying with outside news and stories, all during the meal they were served by the host. The fancy wine cup and fruits and bread shown here were typical sorts of food that travelers were served.
