The first thing it started with was truffles. The white ones were shaved over a butter-daubed wedge of dough, followed by a black one from Irpinia. I sat in the courtyard of the famed Naples pizzeria Concettina ai Tre Santi and watched my waiter as my pizza marathon began.
He came back and put a plate of tomato sauce, a few basil leaves, and a snowstorm of cheese on it. After tying a gingham napkin around my neck, he topped the composition with a deep- fried puff of dough: a classic montanara pizza turned upside-down, the sauce on the bottom, to sustain its crisp- outside, pillowy- inside texture.
Campania is the Italian region where pizza was born and where some of today's pizzaioli are elevating it to sterling new heights. When he was a teenager, Concettina's Ciro Oliva took over his family's delivery joint with dreams of grandeur. In recent years, Mr. Oliva and other high-flying restaurant owners in Naples and nearby have adopted the tasting menu, that haute-cuisine marker of five-star dining, and applied it to pizza. I took a tour of Campania's most hallowed outposts to see how the area is increasing its signature fare.
The Sanit neighborhood of Naples, a rough andtumble district centered around a cacophonous market street, was named one of Time Out's 51 cool neighborhoods in the world this year. Mr. Oliva is a Vesuvius of a man who is known for giving high-fives and talking up his pizza and his neighborhood to people who come to Naples.
Mr. Oliva told me that a margherita should be treated the same as any other Italian product. The jacket is similar to a Loro Piana jacket. It's pizza.
The long-leavened doughs and ingredients have been introduced for a Loro Piana-level experience.
He pointed to a table with a rarefied bottle of Jacques Selosse Extra-Brut and people who ordered a margherita and a Coca-Cola, which was the case with most of the guests.
The pizzerias I visited had excess and accessibility.
Marino Niola, a cultural anthropologist in Naples, told me that pizza was born as sustenance for the poor and would always be tied to the idea of food for all. The tasting menu is a nod to the Michelin guide, which has become the oracle of destination restaurants for food obsessed travelers despite its Francophile standards. Pizza has always been Italy's greatest strength. None of Italy's pizzerias have the distinction of aMichelin star.
I looked at Concettina's morning preparations. A group of pizzaioli with Popeye forearms were kneading bubbles of dough. A cook makes a sauce out of tomatoes. The friarielli greens were spiced with pepperoncinod on the stove. When I bit into a slice of fior di latte, the cheese exploded with juice and it was still warm. Pizza is the beginning of an art form.
After visiting the ancient Greek necropolis of Ipogeo dei Cristallini in Sanit, I headed to Caiazzo, a small hilltop town of 5000 located to the north of Naples.
The subject of a recent episode of "Chef's Table: Pizza", Franco Pepe proudly announced on my arrival at his celebrated Pepe in Grani pizzeria, that he has brought the whole world to Caiazzo with pizza. A survey was taken of the diners around him. There is a country called Holland. There is a country called Norway. There is a country called Malaysia. There are people in India. The capital of Abu Arabia. All of Italy. Guests were dressed up for the occasion, and addressed him with the Italian honorific "Maestro" as they took photos, smiling with the pizza star in chef's whites.
Pizza has always been seen as a fast food item. This is not fast food. Superb raw materials and high-craft cuisine. After his father died, Mr.Pepe took over the pizzeria with his brothers, but in 2012 he split from his siblings and built his own restaurant. He said they knew everything about dough. We had a lot to learn about cooking.
Health food in an Italian context is a generous category, even though Mr. Pepe stressed the nutrition of his menu. The first pizza I was served was a deep- fried anchovy of nearly raw intensity, a sunshine-sweet tomato slice, and a hint of peperoncino.
The young staff stretched fresh pies on the marble countertop in the kitchen while Mr.Pepe described it as the triumphal embodiment of his doctrine. Tradition and innovation meet in this place.
It is thought that dessert pizza is a bad idea after so many courses of dough. The Crisommola del Vesuvio is a slice topped with Vesuvian apricot jam, a lattice of buffalo mozzarella cream, and dried Caiazzo olives. I devoured regional ingredients that were skillfully soliloquy. Who is capable of eating more? I will let you know who I can. The churros were covered in cinnamon and sugar and dipped in a buffalo-ricotto sauce.
There were no toy trains on Sunday, but a substitute shuttle ran from Caiazzo's piazza to Caserta, the center of buffalo Mozzarella production. Since domesticating and milking buffaloes has become so difficult in the US, buffalo mozzarella is wrongly labeled as "mozzarella".
Caserta is a World War II casualty, the site of the German surrender after it was trampled by the Nazis and bombed by the Allies, and its main boulevard has become a low end commercial strip. The 18th-century Reggia di Caserta, the Neapolitan baroque response of the Bourbon King Charles to Versailles, is among the largest royal residences ever built. It is a beautiful place to leave some pizza.
The I Masanielli pizzeria is located next to a gas station and a children's wear shop on the main drag. The most radical pizzas of my pizza pilgrimage are the ones prepared by the man here.
He said that he was viewed as a heretic for his approach to pizza. I knew that I could create my own thing.
I Masanielli is the name of a 17th century Neapolitan revolutionary. He put his tattooed fists on the restaurant table. Can you let me know?
The translation is that he revels in the iconoclasm of his pizzas. He is influenced by the likes of René Redzepi, who wrote "Noma is the watershed between the old and the new", as well as Italy's three-Michelin star headliners.
The kitchen of I Masanielli is larger than a full-size tennis court and is stocked with sous-vide machines. There is a frying station that looks ready for a moon mission. It's a big deal here to deep fry.
I ate a plate of vegetables at the cafe and walked 10 miles, yet I was still hungry after two nights of eating pizza as if it were a ritual. After Mr. Martucci presented the first slice of the tasting menu, I was hungry again.
I had never experienced anything like it on a pizza. There was a slice with a vegetable-reduction paste, fior di latte and jammy prunes on a diaphanous dough cloud. There was a pizza with Kombu seaweed blanketed by the whispery smoke of provolone and a slice with Jerusalem artichokes cooked three ways atop honey-dried pecorino.
It was more than what the senses could see. I Masanielli's award-winning pastry chef, Lilia Colonna, was on maternity leave, so I didn't eat dessert that night.
Mr. Martucci said that he wanted to take pizza to another planet.
He said thatMichelin doesn't see what we're doing. The pizzaiolo wore a flour-dusted black shirt and smiled. There is a new path up here and it is the future of pizza.
Caserta, home of buffalo mozzarella, and Caiazzo, home of a renowned olive variety, are both located in Naples. Travelers can use Naples as a base and visit the other towns by car or train. You can buy tickets for Unico Campania from a newsstand or tobacco shop, or you can check out the schedule at the EAV website. There is frequent train service to and from Naples on Trenitalia and tickets are available online or at Napoli Centrale.
There is a dining room.
The seven-course tasting menu is 50 euro.
There is a six-course tasting menu and a 12 course tasting menu.
There is an eight-course tasting menu at I Masanielli.
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