The best food in the home of pizza is in the city’s underbelly

“We love pizza,” says the Culinary Backstreets tour guide, Maria Anna, an architect with a side hustle of showing people through her home town of Naples. “Pizza for us is like coffee – you have to have it every day.”

But this five-hour walking tour of the street food experiences of Naples doesn’t include a pizza stop. What on Earth am I going to eat for the next five hours if it isn’t my beloved pizza margherita?

Plenty, it turns out. It’s 9am and we’re sitting outside a famous pasticceria in a piazza high on the Vomero hillside, a stylish neighbourhood that many tourists miss. As cars surge past and a man drags a metal trolley along the street, it’s hard to hear what Maria Anna is saying. She laughs. “This is the sound of Naples.”

Six uniformed firemen stand at the bar, so the coffee will be good. Or maybe they’re here for the graffa. A twist of fluffy doughnut, crunchy with sugar, it’s absurdly light and fluffy (the secret is mashed potato in the dough). Or the sfogliatelle, a magical creation of multi-layered laminated pastry, as intricate as a seashell, the crisp crust hiding sweet ricotta and semolina infused with orange and spices.

We’re still brushing off crumbs as we walk on towards the famed Friggitoria Vomero in Piazza Fuga, near the entrance of the dramatic funicular that has linked Naples high and low since 1928.

Three members of the Acunzo family are in the tiny shop; one lowering a small metal cage into the seething oil, one tossing fried balls of dough in sugar, and one filling our cuoppo (cone) with panzerotti, croquettes of mashed potato, arancini rice balls and montanara, fried-then-baked baby pizza smudged with tomato ragu. Naples loves dough, but it especially loves deep-fried dough. “Anything fried is good, even the soles of shoes” goes the local saying.

We eat standing in the street, as a man in a camel hair coat striding past stops to stage-whisper, “This is the best!”

The next two stops yield bitey pecorino and the prized buffalo mozzarella from Paestum, and panini stuffed with friarielli, a local wild broccoli (rapini) wilted in garlicky oil.

Sometimes you learn more about a city by eating on the street than by ticking off the top 10 sights, which is why Ansel Mullins and Yigal Schleifer launched Culinary Backstreets in Istanbul in 2009. “From the start, our mission was to celebrate the unsung heroes of the kitchen, and not the latest brunch spot,” says Mullins. They now run tours across 28 cities from Bangkok to Bilbao. Why Naples?

“For me, Naples is all about these multigenerational family-run businesses fiercely protecting their local food world,” he says. “This has become so rare that it almost sounds like a caricature of 19th-century Europe, but it’s alive and well here.”

Maria Anna also has a genuine love for Naples and wants her group of five – three from Washington, two from Sydney – to learn about the two Naples, the high and the low. “The people from Vomero still refer to ‘going to Naples’ when they travel to the historic centre below,” she says.

It’s time to take the funicular down to the working-class underbelly of the city, the vibrant, chaotic streets of the La Pignasecca market. Life is lived fast and loud here, as mopeds dodge tourists, tomatoes tumble from fruit stands, waiters run trays of coffees, and tiny anchovy (alici) from the Bay of Pozzuoli flash like silver needles at the renowned Pescheria Azzurra fish shop. Tubs of fish almost block the road as we tuck in to a “cuoppo di mare” of their fried-to-order goodies from the sea. (Truly delicious, but still not pizza.)

After a stop at the charming Antica Salumeria Russo dal 1947, Maria Anna announces it is time for lunch, at which everyone bursts out laughing. She finds us a table at the perpetually packed Spiedo d’Oro rosticceria, and over-orders salsiccie and friarielli, and bowls of oven-charred pasta al forno with potato and provola cheese.

Finally, she promises pizza – the traditional fried pizza (pizza fritta). At the tiny Da Gennaro, the dough is patted out, filled with ricotta and San Marzano tomatoes, folded and fried until crisp and gooey. A pistachio gelato at Casa Infante is the final stop, as my fellow tourers groan at the thought of more. “See Naples and die,” moans one.

With only one hour left in the city, I bid them a fond farewell and run off looking for a pizzeria. Would you believe, I can’t find one. A tall young waiter beckons me into his restaurant, but it’s a grill house. “I need pizza,” I tell him. “Over there, the white umbrellas,” he points.

“White umbrella place”, Trattoria Medina, turns out an absolute classic pizza margherita; the crust puffy and charred, the tomato sweetly acidic, the cheese melting into white puddles. Wedged between shop assistants and port workers, I take my last bite of this crazy, loud city and the proud, hard-working culture that thrives in its backstreets.

“Historic cities don’t have to be hollowed-out, museum versions of themselves,” says Mullins. “They can be lived-in, messy places. The more life, the better.” And the more pizza, the better.

DETAILS

TOUR
Culinary Backstreets run two five-hour small-group walking food tours in Naples, several times a week; Culinary Secrets of Backstreet Naples ($210pp) includes pizza stops, and High and Low: A Taste of Two Naples ($210 pp) goes beyond pizza.

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culinarybackstreets.com

The writer travelled at his own expense.