Italy launches pizza candidacy for World Heritage Site

Italy will officially launch pizza's candidacy as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

If approved, it will be the first time that a food tradition will be defined as heritage by UNESCO, according to the person responsible for the idea, Pierluigi Petriollo. There was even a campaign to make pizza an intangible heritage, with around 600 thousand signatures.

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The Italian commission for UNESCO accepted a proposal from the Ministry of Agriculture, supported by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Environment, Economy and Education, for the art of Neapolitan pizza makers to be the country's only candidate for the list of heritage sites. The choice would have been based on the fact that traditional Neapolitan pizza “represents Italy throughout the world”.

The application dossier will be sent to UNESCO, where a long and complex negotiation will involve 200 countries. The candidacy of the “art of Neapolitan pizza chefs” will be analyzed by UNESCO in 2017, at its headquarters in Paris.

A year ago, Italy signaled that it intended to make pizza a World Heritage Site, but the project did not go ahead due to unforeseen bureaucratic issues.

The Italian Minister of Cultural Goods and Tourism, Dario Franceschini, said that this is “a great opportunity” to recognize “a true and proper art”. “Pizza has become a global product that many countries ended up embracing, but they forgot that it is Italian and Neapolitan.”