Pizzeria 400 Gradi: Neapolitan Pizza in Matera
I brought my own holiday to Matera. February 9 is International Pizza Day, after all, so where better to spend it than in a pizzeria in Italy itself? Except that, as I only found out later, Italy celebrates on a different day. Its pizza day falls on January 17, the feast of Saint Anthony the Abbot, patron saint of bakers and pizzaioli - February 9 is National Pizza Day, an American holiday. So I was celebrating someone else's feast day, but in exactly the right place.
Pizzeria 400 Gradi is a small family-run pizzeria in Matera that bakes Neapolitan pizza - a discipline of Italian cuisine with a rulebook and a feast day all its own: a thin center, a puffed-up crust and an oven with nothing but a counter between it and the diners.
Why the Pizzeria Is Called 400 Gradi
The name sounds like a technical spec, and that's exactly the point. The Neapolitan rulebook says nothing about a round 400 degrees: depending on the part of the oven it calls for anywhere from 380 to 485 °C, and the pizza bakes in that heat for 60 to 90 seconds. Four hundred is simply a round number that looks good on a sign - and several pizzerias around the world have picked it independently of each other, from Lecce to Australia. The Matera one belongs to a family: behind the counter, peel in hand, stands pizzaiolo Sandro De Bellis, who opened the place only a few months before my visit; his mother and aunt help in the kitchen, and his father sits at the register. It's a bold start for a newcomer - local reviewers soon began ranking the place among the best Neapolitan pizzerias in town.
Neapolitan Pizza in a City of Bread
Matera has a baking icon of its own, and it isn't pizza: it's Pane di Matera, a bread with protected geographical indication status. Basilicata never developed a pizza tradition of its own, and the Neapolitan style is an import from Campania here - the same one that now rules menus from Milan to Palermo. It's easy to spot: a center so thin it sags under the topping, a crust one to two centimeters high and dotted with dark spots that Italians call leopardatura and that aren't scorch marks but the signature of fierce heat and well-matured dough. One note on that maturing: the dough here rests for up to 48 hours, and everywhere you look you'll read that this makes it easier to digest. Italian trade sites push back on that perennial claim of pizza marketing - a long rise does wonders for flavor and texture, and next to nothing for digestibility.
The dining room is small, booking is essential, and they only open in the evening. Reserving a table pays off for another reason: the oven and the pizzaiolo are right in front of you, and with a full room the team runs like a well-drilled orchestra, the preparation a concert you watch from the front row. The menu runs to around thirty pizzas, and alongside them come fried Neapolitan specialties including montanara. Anyone who remembers the pizza the pubs served back home in Czechia in the nineties - a hard base, ketchup and a heap of ham - will understand why people travel halfway across Europe for a piece of dough. Factor in the coperto, the cover charge: 2 EUR per person is the standard rate in southern Italy.
Salsiccia, Porcini and a Full House
I went for a pizza with salsiccia sausage, porcini and cheese for 10 EUR, and it was superb: the dough paper-thin in the middle, the topping generous, the edges beautifully risen, airy and smelling of the oven. I washed it down with a Volpina from Amarcord, a craft brewery in Rimini - a red ale at 6.5% ABV, 0.4 l for 5.50 EUR, malty and a good deal more serious than the beer you usually get with pizza. The pizzeria was packed to the last table, and yet the pizza still took only a few minutes - you just had to look behind the counter, and there was plenty to see. Next time I'll try January 17.
400 Gradi
