The City of Naples, Italy, which is the birthplace of the Margherita pizza, accomplished a mission that makes the inner fat kid in me absolutely stoked—they just set a new world record for the longest pizza on the planet.
Bringing together 100 chefs who spent 11 hours making the pie, the city just baked a pizza that was 2 kilometers long—or over 6,561 feet. Yep, that’s longer than a fucking mile, bros.
NPR.com got details from one of the organizers, Alessandro Marinacci, describing what inspired the event, along with the difficulties of baking a pizza that takes about 15 minutes to talk end to end:
“Pizza was born in Naples,” says Alessandro Marinacci, who helped organize the smackdown with Caputo flour, “but the record was made in Milan.” Last year, Milan’s pizza clocked in at just over 1.5 kilometers.
“We have custom-designed five motorized wood-burning stoves on wheels,” says Marinacci. “A team will drive the oven and the pizza will pass through the two mouths of the oven.” The pizza gets baked as the cars drive across the pizza.
The finished pizza measured over a foot wide, contained two tons of mozzarella cheese, 1.5 tons of tomatoes, 200 liters of olive oil and 66 pounds of basil, making for one tasty treat.
Oh, and for anyone who’s crazy enough to try and beat this pizza length, be prepared for Naples to regain the top spot soon after, as Marinacci believes that Naples is where the record belongs, per NPR:
“The record has to be in Naples,” says Marinacci. “It’s like Oktoberfest with beer in Munich. We want to identify the city of Naples as where pizza was born.”
Who knows who scarfed all this down, but I wouldn’t mind chowing on some of the leftovers.