Italia is truly the promised land, thank the gods for leading us here! 😭🙏

Explanation: Some rare OC from me!

In one of the founding myths of Ancient Rome, the Aeneid, the Anatolian (modern-day Turkiye) Trojan hero Aeneas is led into exile after the destruction of the city of Troy by the will of the gods, and is given a prophecy that he will know he has found his new promised homeland once hunger forces him and his men to “eat their tables.”

Aeneas is puzzled over how the prophecy is going to come to pass, until, on his journeys, he and his men are served flatbread with toppings. Aeneas then realizes, as he and his men eat, that they are ‘eating their tables’ - and thus have found their new home! Pizza prophecy fulfilled! We’re Italians now!

While the exact definition of pizza is sometimes a point of argument, with the word itself not being used until the medieval period, and tomato sauce not being added (on account of tomatoes coming from the Americas) until ~1700 AD, there is surviving pictoral evidence of flatbread with toppings in a 1st century AD fresco from the city of Pompeii!

(Aeneas also has some other moments which mark him as a ‘stranger in a strange land’ - when making sacrifices in Italy, a snake makes an appearance at the altar, and Aeneas is concerned over the omen - but both by the description of the poem and Italian religious norms of the period, Romans reading the poem would have immediately recognized a harmless snake as a good omen of the genius loci, the spirit of the local land)

Explanation: Some rare OC from me!

In one of the founding myths of Ancient Rome, the Aeneid, the Anatolian (modern-day Turkiye) Trojan hero Aeneas is led into exile after the destruction of the city of Troy by the will of the gods, and is given a prophecy that he will know he has found his new promised homeland once hunger forces him and his men to “eat their tables.”

Aeneas is puzzled over how the prophecy is going to come to pass, until, on his journeys, he and his men are served flatbread with toppings. Aeneas then realizes, as he and his men eat, that they are ‘eating their tables’ - and thus have found their new home! Pizza prophecy fulfilled! We’re Italians now!

While the exact definition of pizza is sometimes a point of argument, with the word itself not being used until the medieval period, and tomato sauce not being added (on account of tomatoes coming from the Americas) until ~1700 AD, there is surviving pictoral evidence of flatbread with toppings in a 1st century AD fresco from the city of Pompeii!

(Aeneas also has some other moments which mark him as a ‘stranger in a strange land’ - when making sacrifices in Italy, a snake makes an appearance at the altar, and Aeneas is concerned over the omen - but both by the description of the poem and Italian religious norms of the period, Romans reading the poem would have immediately recognized a harmless snake as a good omen of the genius loci, the spirit of the local land)