How does a city of seventy-five thousand produce four of the world's hundred best pizzerias? Is Caserta an independent pizza culture, or Naples' talent finding cheaper rent and room to experiment twenty miles north?
Italy · 4 spots selected · last checked 2026-09-18
A provincial city of roughly seventy-five thousand people holds four of the world's hundred best pizzerias, one of them joint fourth, and four of Italy's top sixteen. On professional recognition per head of population Caserta is by a wide margin the most concentrated pizza city in this cohort, and it sits twenty-odd miles from Naples, which has nothing in the world top eleven. Caserta is the record that makes the boundary rule worth having: fold it into Naples and the most interesting fact in the Italian data disappears.
Region
Campania
Tradition
Campanian
Population
72,793 (as of 2025-01-01)
Boundary
The comune di Caserta. It is its own city and is never Naples' overflow, however often the two are spoken of together.
Martucci does not run one dough: opened sources describe several, each with its own bake and a topping built for it, including a three-stage cooking of steam, frying and oven that two independent reviewers single out as the high point of the meal. Luciano Pignataro, who has followed him since his earlier Viale Kennedy premises, writes that the Neapolitan-style dough under the composed pizzas has few equals at the moment, and that Martucci is at the oven almost every day of the year. The pizzeria is a few minutes' walk from the Reggia, inside the comune di Caserta.
The dough is worked daily on the premises from a flour selection Martucci put together himself, and a named reviewer who ate there records one pizza taken to 83% hydration and baked in three stages — steam at 100°C, fried at 180°C, finished in a fan oven at 300°C. The lineage is documented rather than asserted: he learned from the age of ten watching his uncle, the maestro pizzaiolo Francesco Pagliaro, and the room he has occupied since 2016 was his uncle's own pizzeria, Il Solito Posto. Four pizzas on the current menu are dedicated to that uncle.
This is the Caserta record with the maker's own numbers in it. Vitiello, quoted directly in a named review, describes a blend of wholemeal, semola, 0 and 00 flours with dried lievito madre, a 100% biga run at deliberately varied temperatures to keep acidity down, 85% water plus 3% oil, and a bake at 380°C. He grows vegetables for the pizzas on a reclaimed plot below the UNESCO silk village of San Leucio and a hydroponic vertical garden in the pizzeria's own grounds. San Leucio is a frazione of the comune di Caserta, not a separate town.
De Gregorio has been at the bench and the oven since the day the place opened, in the ground floor of the Villa Maria Cristina hotel a few minutes from the Reggia and the station. Opened sources describe a highly hydrated, open-crumbed dough with a pronounced cornicione, dough balls calibrated at 210–220 g, an electric oven chosen for drying and precision, and doubles bakes that begin with steam from 100°C to 180°C before the oven. The same dough is carried into a dedicated dessert-pizza list, fried, blast-frozen and regenerated in the oven with sugar and cinnamon to seal the base.