Pizza with Pepperoni - A Roman driving guide explains what it means in Italy

Pizza with Pepperoni
The other day I went to the hotel Excelsior in Florence to pick up my group for our tour of the city. We had already spent a few days together, they had arrived a few days earlier at Rome’s airport and we had driven from there straight to Positano.

After spending a couple of days in the area, visiting Pompeii, Capri and the Amalfi Coast, we drove to Rome and spent a few days exploring the “Eternal City” and its surroundings. We finally arrived in Florence the day before after visiting Orvieto and Sienna on the way. Now we were bound for a full day tour of the city of Florence with the help of a local guide for the tour of the Accademia and the Uffizi museums. While we waited for the guide to arrive we chatted about this and that and, I don’t recall why, I started to talk about how the meaning of the exact same word varied depending on the country where it was used.

I brought up as an example the fatidic “Pizza with Peperoni”. I started to explain that in Italy we call “peperoni” peppers, capsicum. In the USA instead, you call that a spicy hot “salame” sausage that we generally here call “salame piccante”, piccante meaning spicy hot. But is called different names in other parts of Italy: “pezzenta”, “secondigliano”, “ventricina”, “salamella” etcetera. So I continued to explain that often you see Americans ordering “Pizza with Peperoni” at a restaurant and getting pizza with peppers.

They inevitably end up arguing with the waiter thinking he messed up with their order. Now in almost all the pizzerias they keep en Italian-English dictionary just so that they can leaf through it and show the customer that he actually ordered pizza-with-capsicum and he shouldn’t complain because that’s exactly what he got. As I was telling my story I noticed that my clients started to look at each other looking embarrassed and, as I finished one of them asked me: “Where did you have dinner last night?”

I didn’t understand right away what this had to do with the story I just told, but I explained that I was friends with the family of Maria Elena, the guide that was about to meet us for the tour and we had diner together at their place the night before. “Why?” I concluded. “Well,” My client said “we thought you had dinner in the same restaurant where we had pizza last night, because the story you told is our own story. I other words what you just narrated is what happened to us yesterday. You should have seen Joe’s face when the owner of the restaurant showed him the dictionary!”