English: Picture of an authentic Neapolitan Pizza Margherita taken by Valerio Capello on September 6th 2005 in a pizzeria (“I Decumani”) located on the Via dei Tribunali in Naples. Italiano: Fotografia di un’autentica pizza Margherita napoletana scattata da Valerio Capello il 6 settembre 2005 nella pizzeria “I Decumani” situata in Via dei Tribunali a Napoli. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Regular readers of this blog might remember about a month ago, that we reached saturation levels with goulash and dumplings in Central Europe. Well, we have now maxed out on pizza and pasta in Italy, as well!

To bring the you up to date, originally we planned to spend two weeks in Italy but have now spent four weeks, having been delayed waiting for our cargo-cruise to take us and our car to Cyprus. The latest delay is because our ship was held up in Valencia, Spain as a result of a dockers’ strike. The good news is that our ship docks in Salerno at 3.00 PM Saturday and we shall be there waiting to board. After all the delays and excuses, we are really pleased that we are actually now leaving Italy, as much as we love it, enough is enough!

Anyway, having spent a month in Italy we have seen how pizza and pizzerias now dominate Italian life. In Venice and Florence, we thought that we were observing tourists on pizza survival diets, dealing with sky-high prices. However, as we moved to Southern Italy we observed that Italians were choosing pizza over other Italian favorites and we have seen them order pizza as a starter! Traditional Italian cuisine seems to have given way to Modern Italian cuisine, largely based on pizza. We have noticed that young children have a preference for a portion of chips (french fries) on top of their pizza! Whatever happened to the Mediterranean Diet?

Of course, real Italian Pizza is very different to American Pizza which now seems to have become the standard pizza across the World outside Italy. Real Italian pizza comes originally from Naples and uses buffalo mozzarella cheese which tastes completely different to the normal mozzarella cheese. We have actually been staying in the area where the finest Italian buffalo mozzarella is produced near Paestum. Of course the Italians are still very much into their pasta dishes and their home-made pasta is quite special that only they have the skill of making and are we are not yet observing pasta and chips but no doubt that will come!

For our last night in Italy, we are off to our favourite, beach-front, family restaurant to sample the catch-of-the day and probably the local fresh pasta.