Foods similar to pizza have been made since the neolithic age . Records of people adding other ingredients to bread to make it more flavorful can be found throughout ancient history . The ancient Greeks covered their bread with oils , herbs and cheese , and in the 6th century BC , the soldiers in Persian King Darius I armies baked flatbreads with cheese and dates on top of their battle shields .
Modern pizza evolved from similar flatbread dishes in Naples , Italy in the 18th or early 19th century . Prior to that time , flatbread was often topped with ingredients such as garlic , salt , lard , cheese , and basil . It is uncertain when tomatoes were first added and there are many conflicting claims . Until about 1830 , pizza was sold from openair stands and out of pizza bakeries , and pizzerias keep this old tradition alive today .
A popular contemporary legend holds that the archetypal pizza , pizza Margherita , was invented in 1889 , when the Royal Palace of Capodimonte commissioned the Neapolitan pizzaiolo ( pizza maker ) Raffaele Esposito to create a pizza in honor of the visiting Queen Margherita . Of the three different pizzas he created , the Queen strongly preferred a pizza swathed in the colors of the Italian flag : red ( tomato ), green ( basil ), and white ( mozzarella ). Supposedly , this kind of pizza was then named after the Queen , although recent research casts doubt on this legend .
Pizza was brought to the United States with Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth century , and first appeared in areas where Italian immigrants concentrated . The country ' s first pizzeria , Lombardi ' s , opened in 1905 . Following World War II , veterans returning from the Italian Campaign after being introduced to Italy ' s native cuisine proved a ready market for pizza in particular . Since then pizza consumption has exploded in the U . S . Pizza chains such as Domino ' s , Pizza Hut , and Papa John ' s , pizzas from take and bake pizzerias , and chilled or frozen pizzas from supermarkets make pizza readily available nationwide . It is so ubiquitous , thirteen percent of the U . S . population consumes pizza on any given day .