The surprising French city where pizza rules

On a balmy night in Marseille, France’s second-largest city, crowds move through the graffiti-toned streets of the central Cours Julien neighborhood. Buildings are splashed in color as if the nearby Mediterranean had washed up, ebbed out and left behind pigments of a shattered rainbow.

It’s almost midnight. The square is still buzzing with people cracking jokes and taking swigs of pastis.

Restaurants are mostly closed, but a warm glow beckons from open counters, where the scent of tomato sauce, cheese and dough wafts through the air. “Here, the late-night food isn’t really kebabs or crepes,” my Marseille-native friend Simon told me when I moved to the city just over a year ago. “It’s pizza.” Marseille pizza has a harder crust than the soft Neapolitan style. It’s typically made with Emmental cheese instead of mozzarella. Some say this is simply because Emmental was traditionally more readily available; others swear it’s saltier and richer. Pizza makers frequently swap Provençal marjoram for oregano; sometimes they sprinkle raw garlic on top.

The classic Marseille slice is the moitié-moitié (half-half), a tomato-based pie with anchovies on one side and cheese on the other. The Armenian has minced beef, onions and peppers. Sweet figatelli sausage and brousse cheese, which is similar to ricotta, top the Corsican slice. Halal pizza is available in Noailles, a neighborhood near the port.

That variety reflects the city itself. Italians first brought pizza to Marseille in the late 19th century, and since then, waves of immigrants, from places like Armenia, Corsica and Algeria, have all embraced the dish and made it their own.

“It’s not very different from other big industrial port cities, but the difference in Marseille, a bit like New York maybe, is that there’s a sort of narrative of cosmopolitanism,” Céline Regnard, a local historian, said. “The city thinks of itself as a melting pot.”

Marseille is a mosaic of the people, culture and history that shape it. Pizza is a way to explore that mosaic. Italian immigrants arrived in Marseille en masse throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, many landing in Le Panier, the city’s oldest district, where they opened restaurants like La Bella Pizza, the city’s first recorded pizzeria.

Joséphine Roccaro and her husband ran a farm in Sicily before moving to Marseille sometime in the 1920s — their family isn’t sure of the exact year. Roccaro initially sold pizza on the street from a wooden crate. Then in 1924, she opened La Bella Pizza.

The original restaurant no longer exists. But near the Cours Julien, a discreet black door opens to the radiating hum of a dimly lit, crowded room. Wineglasses clink like wind chimes. The pizza maker twists and twirls dough against the backdrop of a fiery oven. The space is narrow, but when the weather’s nice — which is most of the time in Marseille — diners spill out onto the terrace. This is the La Bella Pizza of today, and it’s run by Romain Sapienza, 34, Roccaro’s great-great-grandson.

During a recent visit, Sapienza strolled out from behind the counter with a smile. He opened the restaurant in 2021 after spending years in an office job. He was eager to work with his hands, he said, making the motion of kneading pizza dough.

When he was growing up in a nearby town, his parents’ and grandparents’ house — which were less than half a mile away from each other — were both equipped with pizza ovens in the backyard, he said, as he flipped through some old photo scans on his phone.

In one picture, the family gathered around a white plastic table draped in floral cloth as his grandmother sliced a pizza. Sapienza said his grandparents owned their own Marseille restaurant, which had a different name, in the 1960s. There, he said, drug traffickers and pimps would dine next to the police chief and tourists.

La Bella Pizza makes Marseille-style pizza topped with fresh garlic; Sapienza said a slice should be crisp enough to be held with three fingers — thumb, index and middle — and it should be hard on the bottom and soft inside.

“Marseille pizza is a pizza that has a story,” he said. “We sense the history, the humanity, the culture through food and how it’s eaten.” Takeout pizza is big in Marseille; more than 50 trucks roam the city, parking in different locations depending on the day. People bring pizza to the seaside and casual bars, sometimes offering to share with whoever’s nearby. When the home soccer team, Olympique de Marseille, plays a match, it feels as if everyone in the city has a slice in hand. Many even eat it on the move, a rarity in France, where sitting down for meals is sacramental.