Confessions of a pizza virgin

It’s true – I was 18 before I had my first taste of pizza, and it was in Italy that I lost my pizza virginity, and what better place to lose it. I was travelling alone around Europe and spent many lonely days and nights on trains and in cafes. It was winter, and even Italy seemed to be caught in a great welter of sadness.

I felt the need for company and sunshine, things I had known nothing of for weeks on end it seemed, so I decided to head further south, to Greece. That decision was made in Naples, just as I got off the boat from a day in Capri. It had been a stormy crossing and there had been nowhere on the deck of the tiny, over-loaded boat to shelter from the biting wind. I was hungry.

Next day I took the train to Brindisi to catch the ferry to Corfu. Just a few miles from Brindisi, on that snowy November afternoon, the train stopped. There was no station, just wet, miserable countryside in every direction and a hideous sky above, full of snow clouds and the approaching darkness of the night. The sun had given up a long time before and had retreated early, overcome by heavy clouds that piled up on top of each other. I was hungry.

The other passengers seemed not to notice that we were no longer travelling anywhere. There were only four others in the carriage and one of them, a Canadian girl called Evie, took out her guitar and started singing Leonard Cohen songs. No-one has ever covered a Cohen song quite like Evie, and Cohen songs I think have never brought light and heat into a frigid railway carriage in the way they did that bleak afternoon.

Evie told me that there was a strike. The strike was set to begin at 4 pm and since we weren’t at a station at that time we just had to sit it out in the train. At 5 pm precisely the train moved off, the heating system came on and within 10 minutes we slid noiselessly into Brindisi station.

I was still in time for the overnight ferry to Corfu, but because of the storms over the Adriatic the ferry had been cancelled that night, and that was when I fully realised just how hungry I was. I had eaten in cheap cafes for many weeks and hadn’t had what anyone would call a decent square meal in all that time, and there beside me, as the hunger was about to demolish my wasted body, was a shop that sold pizza.

I hadn’t a clue what pizza was (it hadn’t hit Ireland back then) but when I saw it I knew I had to have it as it lay there in huge slabs all red and yellow and green and warm. It was priced by the kilo but I had no idea how big or small a kilo was – kilos hadn’t arrived in Ireland either back then. I hovered for a while watching and listening to other people buying slices but still was unsure what to ask for having no Italian and no way of judging how much to ask for.

So I plumped for a kilo. I pointed to a slab of warm pizza and said “un Kilo of that one”. The man looked at me as if I had asked for something strange and whacked off an enormous slice of pizza. It really was big, too big, but in it went and boy it was good. There was easily enough for three people in that giant slice but I was hungry and it tasted so good. I loved the feel of the grease on my lips when the pizza was gone and the smell that lingered and I hung around the shop for a long time just breathing in the warm, flavoursome air. I was utterly satisfied and content. I’d even forgotten that I still had to find somewhere to sleep that night and even the freezing snow-turned-to-rain that had started to fall couldn’t take away the shock of the pleasure of that first time.

And I haven’t stopped eating pizza ever since. I couldn’t do without it now. If I don’t get it at least every few days I get restless and ill at ease, and my wife knows that all I need is some of the good stuff.