Today on Food on Fridays we consider the mystery of pizza in Verona.
Yes, I know, a mystery could have waited until Monday. However, pizza properly belongs in a Food on Fridays post, and the “mystery” is really just something that seems striking, not truly mysterious.
Now the mystery is not how pizza is served in Verona. You eat it with a knife and fork here, not in slices, but that’s standard for how you eat pizza everywhere in Italy. (You can read more about that in an old blog post of mine here.)
Pizza with olives and pepperoni, with a knife at the ready to cut it
And the mystery is also not why the olives on a pizza are always left whole and unpitted. Although I love olives, I do find having whole olives on a pizza still a bit unusual, even after years of ordering pizza in Italy.
Pizzas with olives, onions and other stuff
Nope, the mystery is why so many former churches in Verona have been turned into pizzerias. There are at least three pizzerias in former churches that we know of, including one named Santa Felicita, which is around the corner from where we are staying (and which is where the pizzas pictured above were eaten). Here’s a look inside the former church turned pizza place:
Santa Felicita Pizzeria/Restaurant
Mystery glow, Santa Felicita
Seeing stars, Santa Felicita
Chris joked that perhaps Napoleon, who was responsible for closing the churches, turned them into pizzerias because he secretly loved pizzas. Cute, but that’s probably not the real story. 
In fact, Santa Felicita at least didn’t immediately become a pizza place when it closed in the 1800s. In the late 1800s most of the frescos removed for conservation in a museum elsewhere in town, and the inside has been renovated over the years for various purposes. It’s been various things over the years, including the office for an architectural firm where our current landlady’s father worked; she told us she remembered going to visit her father there as a child, when he worked there and before it became the pizzeria/restaurant it is today.
BTW, the pizza was pretty good – I’d recommend it as a place to go for the food as well as for the chance to eat a pizza while sitting inside a very old church.
Of course, it’s not that unusual to be able to do that here in Verona.