La Masardona

La Masardona is a Naples institution of a very specific kind: a fried pizza shop that has been operating since 1945 from a small premises near Napoli Centrale station, open only in the mornings and with no tables. This is street food at its most elemental. The calzone fritto — a half-moon of yeasted dough, fried in hot oil and stuffed with ricotta, cicoli (rendered pork fat), and black pepper — is considered by many food critics to be the definitive expression of pizza fritta, the fried pizza tradition that predates the oven-baked version and sustained Naples through the post-war poverty years when mozzarella was too expensive for ordinary families. The shop is run by the Piccirillo family, who have maintained the recipe and the method unchanged for generations. The dough is light and airy despite being fried, with a crackle to the exterior and a yielding, intensely savoury interior. A second option, the pizza fritta con cicoli, is a flat fried disc — the version Sophia Loren sold from a street cart in the 1954 film L'Oro di Napoli, which is set in precisely the kind of Neapolitan street food culture that La Masardona represents. The shop is small, cash-only, and operates to its own schedule — early birds are rewarded, as it sells out by mid-morning on busy days. This is emphatically not a tourist restaurant but rather a working neighbourhood institution that happens to produce one of Italy's most extraordinary snacks.