Every year there are journalists who enjoy drawing up a ranking of the best pizza makers, consequently also electing the best pizza maker in Italy and in the world.
All legal for heaven's sake, everyone is free to make their own classifications according to their personal judgment, provided they do not try to pass off their personal tastes as absolute truth. For example, the "Rolling Stone" newspaper, which in the field of music is a true authority when it ranks the best musicians, puts the wording "according to Rolling Stone". Newspapers such as "La Repubblica" which published the news with the headline "Here's who is the best pizza maker in the world" should instead have specified that this ranking is not unanimous but is made according to the personal judgment of these 3 Neapolitan journalists (who moreover they have opened a blog for less than a year).
Always remember that newspapers and journalists often do not give well-founded information, even worse, some spread the so-called "fake news" and sometimes have an ulterior motive in divulging the news. I'll give you an example a few years ago the actor Paolo Calabresi phoned the management of Milan posing as the manager of the actor Nicolas Cage, asking for 2 tickets to go and see the Roma - Milan match, they believed it without verifying, they sent him tickets for the grandstand and Galliani spread the news to newspapers and televisions that Nicolas Cage would be present at the match. The day after the newspapers and televisions wrote that Nicolas Cage had been present at the match also publishing a photo of the fake Nicolas Cage present in the vip gallery. The newspapers published a false story without verifying it and everyone who read the newspaper believed it. Here this is just an example to make you understand the power that the media have but it doesn't mean that everything you read is true. Let's go back to the news of the ranking of the best pizza chefs in Italy behind this operation of the ranking of the best pizza chefs in Italy which in my opinion is only a commercial operation, there are certainly many other interests than just the love of pizza. Let's start thinking about a first fact: do you think 3 journalists start traveling around Italy to taste pizzas, incurring travel expenses and more without any economic interest? Who pays them their travel costs? Second thing: in Italy there are thousands and thousands of pizzerias, do you think it is possible that they have tried them all? You already have the answer.
At the top of this ranking then strangely for years there have always been the same Neapolitan and Caserta pizza makers who alternate with the first places, the first not to be from Campania are pizza makers who have already been mentioned on other occasions by the newspapers or in some conference on gourmet pizza, hence the usual names there too. I know very good Neapolitan pizza makers and those from other regions who have never been nominated and who have nothing less than those who won this ranking or those who reached the top places, I can say this because I have eaten both most of the pizzas of the pizza makers who have been this classification than those of these other pizza makers not in the classification.
It should also be added that of these great pizza makers who are praised every year in this ranking, many of them have now moved on to the role of entrepreneur and less than half of them spend the night in front of the oven making pizzas. If you don't believe it, go to these top ten pizzerias any day of the week and see for yourself if the top ten of this ranking are making pizzas, so the credit for the goodness of their pizza should be given to the pizza chefs employed by these pizzerias that actually make the pizzas for them, that's what I think.
Another of the reasons why the best pizza maker in Italy or in the world cannot be elected is that in every area of Italy and especially in the world there are different tastes in terms of pizza. For example, in many areas they like thin pizza, in others taller and crunchier, in others the Neapolitan style, so how do you elect (as these journalists did) a pizza maker who makes Neapolitan style as the best pizza maker in the world in absolute sense? If the pizza maker nominated as the best in the world by these three journalists would open a pizzeria in other areas of Italy or the world, he would have to adapt to people's tastes or he would certainly not be considered the best in the area because there are areas of Italy, for example, where Neapolitan pizza is not the most popular. In my opinion, therefore, having the presumption of electing the best pizza maker in Italy means two things: either being presumptuous or not really knowing the tastes in terms of pizza in all areas of Italy. Nor can it be said that the best pizza chef in Italy is also the best pizza chef in the world given the many pizzerias in the world and it would be impossible to judge them all, furthermore the city in the world that consumes the most estimated pizza is San Paolo of Brazil where they certainly don't eat Neapolitan-style pizza.
Other somewhat strange things about this ranking is that even if pizzerias from all regions are mentioned just to give the semblance of a real national ranking, in many small regions such as Umbria for example, there are pizzerias in the ranking that don't really seem to be the best in the world. place, just to cite an example in Perugia they put a bar that also makes pizza by the slice as the best pizzeria, leaving out the real renowned pizzerias of the city, which does not denote a certain professionalism on the part of those who went to judge (if they really c 'he went and didn't just look at reviews from Trip advisor or recommendations from friends from home). The 3 journalists say that they have selected 900 pizzerias to which 107 incognito inspectors went to try them, so why, for the sake of transparency, do they not publish the list of all the 900 pizzerias they had selected, the names of the 107 inspectors who allegedly went there and the method of judgment they used? And why don't they declare why the pizzeria that won would be the best in all of Italy for them? What would that pizza chef have so special about the others? Given the way in which the classification was made, I believe that the three journalists already knew from the beginning which pizza chefs they would rely on to elect the first 10 on the list and to give the semblance of a real classification they filled many places in the classification based on comments found on Trip advisor and asking for some names to give to some journalist friends scattered here and there in Italy who in turn provided names based on pizzerias that in their opinion were good without actually going to try all the pizzerias in the area.
If we then add that the ranking of the best pizzerias in Italy is made by 3 Neapolitans, I don't think a pizza chef from Treviso will ever win if he makes a crunchy style of pizza, for example. In my opinion, I don't think that any of the 3 journalists bothered to go and taste a pizzeria 700 km away from Naples which, according to their judging method, if it doesn't make a Neapolitan-style dough, it wouldn't be considered a real one by them. Pizza. If the 3 journalists really wanted to make a ranking, the only thing they could do was their personal classic of the best pizzerias in Naples and its surroundings, leaving aside delusions of grandeur and the presumption of classifying the best pizzerias in Italy or in the world. Dear readers, always think with your head and don't let yourself be influenced by the personal judgment of those who write articles in the newspapers because they are never the absolute truth, and in this case watch out for "hoaxes" because the best pizza maker in Italy in the absolute sense does not exist , let alone the best pizza chef in the world.
