This image supplied on Tuesday, June 27, 2023, by the Pompeii Archaeological Park reveals the wall of an historical Pompeian home with a fresco depicting a desk with meals.

Pompeii Archaelogical Park/AP

cover caption

toggle caption

Pompeii Archaelogical Park/AP

This image supplied on Tuesday, June 27, 2023, by the Pompeii Archaeological Park reveals the wall of an historical Pompeian home with a fresco depicting a desk with meals.

Pompeii Archaelogical Park/AP

MILAN — A still-life fresco found just lately within the Pompeii archaeological website appears to be like like a pizza, but it surely’s not, specialists on the archaeological website stated Tuesday.

They famous that key elements wanted to make Italy’s iconic dish — tomatoes and mozzarella — weren’t accessible when the fresco was painted some 2,000 years in the past.

Tomatoes had been solely launched to Europe from the Americas a number of centuries in the past, and a few histories have it that the invention of mozzarella led on to the invention of pizza in close by Naples within the 1700s.

The picture is as a substitute believed to be a focaccia coated with fruit, together with pomegranate and probably dates, completed with spices or a kind of pesto, specialists stated. In the fresco, it’s served on a silver plate and a wine chalice stands subsequent to it.

The distinction of the frugal meal served in an expensive setting, denoted by the silver tray, is just not in contrast to modern-day pizza, “born as a poor-man’s dish in southern Italy, which has won over the world and is served even in starred restaurants,” stated Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii archaeological website.

The historical Roman metropolis of Pompeii was destroyed within the eruption of close by Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. The sudden and lethal occasion left a lot of the construction intact, embalmed in volcanic ash, and the positioning is now a significant archaeological venture and vacationer attraction.

The Coldiretti ag foyer instantly seized on the invention of the fresco to advertise pizza — invented as a fast meal for the working poor — as a nationwide treasure. Today, pizza represents one-third of the meals price range of overseas guests and generates complete annual revenues of 15 billion euros ($16.4 billion) in Italy.

The artwork of the Neapolitan pizzamaker was placed on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage checklist in 2017, acknowledged for its 4 phases of dough preparation and for being baked solely in a wooden oven at 485 levels Celsius (905 levels Fahrenheit.)