Jonathan Sa'adah

Category: Europe

  • Exploring Neopolitan Pizza – Starita

    Exploring Neopolitan Pizza – Starita

    A Neopolitan pizza, just out of the oven, and ready to serve. What could be better? Normally it’s brought to the table unsliced, still inflated and soft from the intense heat.

    One of the reasons, maybe even the main reason – I wanted to go to Naples, was to eat Neopolitan pizza on its home turf. I was surprised how my priority faded away as I jumped into this truly rich and alive city. I was also surprised at how, instead of me leading the pizza eating, it was Beth clamouring for more. Some days we’d eat pizza twice – considerably up from the tolerance level at home. Part of the difference, of course, has something to do with my pizza not being on the level of Napoli pizza. Napoli pizzas are so light as to be almost ethereal. It feels and tastes like a divine combination of melted hot mozzarella, tomato and warm soft dough dancing in a steam cloud. At home Beth will usually leave the edges of my pizzas on the plate. In Naples I had to protect my own slices from my ravenous partner.

    Even with our enthusiastic approach we weren’t able to come close to covering the list of pizzerias I wanted to visit. But three places stood out. It’s almost not fair to highlight them because even the worst pizza we had in Naples still approached a work of art. That’s how good Naples pizza was, so it certainly didn’t disappoint either one of us. This essay is about Starita, one of those places.

    Via Materdei near Starita Pizza

    I did get the impression that pizza has become big business in Naples. A lot of people – tourists from all nations (including Italy) – come to Naples expecting to eat pizza and serving them in large numbers generates good cash. So many of the pizzerias have expanded their seating capacity, either by renovating their existing premises, buying adjacent properties and serving there too, or opening up other pizzerias at other locations under their name. Pizza in Naples isn’t expensive – it costs about half of what we pay in Montreal – but a successful pizzeria can be a lucrative enterprise.

    Starita’s entrance
    Kitchen staff at Starita giving me the one-over.

    Starita is up a narrow stony lane in a working-class neighbourhood. The street it’s on – Via Materdei – climbs up out of Naples’ historic center. Starita began life in 1901 as a cantina, serving local wines. The original founder – Alfonso Starita – stuck to the simple formula serving wine to working-class residents of the neighborhood. It was one of his children who in 1933 expanded the operation, serving utilitarian Neapolitan dishes – bean soup, fried anchovies, fried baccalà, tripe, and fried pizzas. It wasn’t until 1948 that Starita became a pizzeria friggitoria – a fried food shop and pizzeria. A few years later its fame was sealed by a bodacious Sophia Loren, who in the 1954 film L’Oro di Napoli, played a sexy, beautiful and adulterous pizza seller. Starita was used in the film as a hole-in-the-wall shop selling fried street food. Instantly, the film put Starita on the map. The connection between Starita and Sophia Loren has become inseparable from the pizzeria’s identity. But the depiction in the film of pizza being the food of the poor, with pizza being sold on credit, was real and was drawn from the economic conditions of postwar Naples, experiences that the Starita family had lived through firsthand.

    Starita in 1954 Vittorio De Sica’s film L’Oro di Napoli with Sophia Loren and Giacomo Furia using Starita as a location. This film instantly made the pizzeria a popular destination! Photo credit: Screengrab from YouTube
    Starita today An original poster for the Sophia Loren film is on the back wall.

    I wasn’t prepared for how friendly it would be to eat there. We probably didn’t appear to be anything more than English-speaking tourists, albeit both with a pizza-based enthusiasm (probably not rare either), but we were treated well. The experience is that your order is placed and a couple of minutes later the pizza is before you – it’s literally that fast. There’s an immediacy to eating that makes it quite satisfying! As well, none of the pizzerias in Naples are shy about having pictures taken – they invite it – and some even have carefully thought out angles they try and encourage you to show. Starita doesn’t go that far. It is a pizzeria confident of its position and concentrates on making great pizza, and providing an environment that makes eating those pizzas a memorable experience. For us they succeeded. Even though we were trying to eat in as many places as we could manage, we still came back a second time.
    From its modest days as a neighborhood cantina Starita has expanded. Well reviewed versions of the pizzeria have opened in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen (2012), Milan (2016), Turnin (2018) and Florence (2021). Despite the growth, the Materdei original remains the beating heart of the operation. The pizzas are what count, and they are what will draw me back there over and over.

    Antonio Starita is the third-generation owner of Starita and a central figure in the institutional protection of Neapolitan pizza culture. In 2016, he became the founding president of the Unione Pizzerie Storiche Napoletane, which brings together ten of Naples’ oldest pizzerias (Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba, L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele, Pizzeria Lombardi, Starita, and others). He is currently transitioning the business to the fourth generation – his son and daughter.

    For more:
    YouTube video of how they make their dough link (this will make you hungry!)
    YouTube video of the Sophia Loren scene from L’Oro di Napoli link link2 (both worth watching!)

  • Meteora II

    Meteora II

    The fog rolls in before dawn, thick as wool and heavy with moisture. It slides down the stone towers of Meteora, wrapping itself around ledges, dripping from the pine needles, muting the world into a hush. The monastery bells sound closer in this weather, their slow toll absorbed by the air before it can echo off the cliffs.

    The sandstone smells damp and raw, its ancient layers darkened almost to bronze. Steps cut into the rock are slick; your hand finds the cold iron of the rail, wet to the touch. Even your breath feels visible here, joining the drifting mist that curls across the paths. From below, the valley disappears entirely—there is no distance, only the whiteness that erases edges and scale.

    When the fog begins to thin, it leaves beads of water on every surface: railings, ferns, camera lenses. A patch of blue cracks open above one monastery roof, sudden and startling. For a few seconds, the whole landscape gleams—stone, sky, and lingering veil of fog turning silver together, as if the world were exhaling after holding its breath all morning.

    More photos and writing about Meteora

  • Side by Side with Don Cherry: Notes from the Moki Years

    Side by Side with Don Cherry: Notes from the Moki Years

    Concert For a Field (Thetford, Vermont, 1970)

    Don Cherry was always evolving, both a teacher and a student, moving on a musical and personal journey through many related but different landscapes. In the six years (1970 to 1976) when I knew him well, he was exploring a holistic fusion of life, art, and sound developed with his wife, Moki Cherry. For much of that time they worked out of their base in an old schoolhouse in southern Sweden.

    Barnett, Vermont, 1975.


    As part of his evolution as a musician Don was always collecting and studying instruments from across the globe: the doussn’gouni (Malian hunter’s harp), bamboo flutes, and various percussive instruments. He learned through the exchange of tapes and travel/sharing with other musicians. His 1975 album Brown Rice exemplified this synthesis, incorporating Indian scales, Middle Eastern modalities, and African rhythmic structures well before the tag “world music” even existed. Collaborations with Turkish drummer Okay Temiz further cemented Cherry’s commitment to what he viewed as a universal musical language, unencumbered by geographic or genre boundaries.

    Don and Okay Temiz seem a little skeptical of Moki’s elephant. (Stockholm, 1971)
    Moki and Don’s collaboration at the Moderna Museet. Okay Temiz in the centre. (Stockholm 1971)


    Don’s weakness was his on-and-off heroin addiction, which Moki fought against through her love and attempting to keep him physically separated from the people and places that encouraged him to backslide. It was not an easy life, but he was a man who gave a lot to the people he cared for, and I was grateful to be in his and Moki’s creative family for the years that I was.

    Don Cherry with his son, Eagle-Eye, looking out at Gamla Stan. (Stockholm, 1971)
  • Meteora

    Meteora

    We had come to see Meteora on a misty morning in November, 2018. The ground-hugging fog drifted like a low cloud across the Thessalian plain, swallowing the road ahead and the hulking silhouettes of rock that we knew were there but could not yet see. Somewhere above, the monasteries of Meteora – “suspended in the air,” as their name has been translated for centuries – waited in the whiteout, as they have since the first hermits began climbing into caves up there in the 11th century.

    As the sun rose higher, the fog began to thin, tearing open in slow, luminous veils that revealed vertical sandstone columns, their flanks slick and dark from the night’s moisture.

    These towers were born some 60 million years ago, when a vast river emptied into an inland sea and left behind a thick delta of sand and stone that erosion later carved into cliffs and pinnacles. In that shifting light, each rock appeared to detach from the earth itself, justifying the medieval monks’ sense that this was not simply landscape, but a kind of natural ladder between ground and sky.

    High on the cliffs, a monastery emerged from the mist: a cluster of ochre walls and red-tile roofs clinging to the summit as if it had grown from the stone. In the 14th century, Athanasios Koinovitis, later known as Athanasios the Meteorite, chose one of these broad rock platforms to found the Great Meteoron, hauling every beam and stone up the sheer face by rope and ladder. The isolation offered protection in that age of raids and political upheaval; access once depended on nets and retractable stairways, a deliberate barrier between the cloistered world above and the dangerous valley below.

    By the time the sun finally broke through, the valley below had turned into a tapestry of autumn color: rust-red oaks, yellowing plane trees, and dark green pines pooling at the bases of the rocks. In the era of Ottoman rule, when these monasteries flourished under sultans who left Orthodox institutions largely intact, the same slopes hid rebels and sheltered refugees; in the 19th and 20th centuries, walls that once enclosed prayer were scarred by shells and mortars.

    As we moved along the viewpoints that early morning, each gap in the fog offered a new alignment of rock, monastery, and forest, a sequence of tableaux that seemed staged by the weather itself. Looking out across the chasm to another monastery perched on its own pillar, it was possible to imagine the first hermits edging out of their caves at dawn, watching mist lift from this same plain and reading it as a sign – of judgment, of mercy, of simple passing time – in a landscape that felt charged with meaning. Today, buses replace mules and carved stairways replace rope ladders, but the choreography of fog and light still resists domestication; for a few minutes on that November day, the cliffs and their glowing trees belonged less to the age of mass tourism than to the long, solitary devotion that first drew human beings to live in the air.

  • How Wrong I Was

    How Wrong I Was

    When we arrived in Naples my first impressions were of physical deterioration, vandalism, and filth. When thrown suddenly into the chaos and traffic just outside the airport the contrast with Montreal felt like too much! A visceral body blow.

    Looking back now I can see how wrong I was. Yes, Naples is chaotic, smelly and, in ways, a maddening place but its lifeblood and character transcend its drawbacks. I came away feeling lasting affection and respect.

    Disclosure: Alas, I have no blood connection to Italy, so what I write is based on a short period – nine days in the city, though I’ve had other visits to the country. Italy, and Naples especially, inspires strong opinions so chime with your experiences.

    ▲ Naples is actually about only a half of Montreal’s population within the metropolitan area, but it clearly wins on location with the Mediterranean and warm climate. Not to be overlooked, there’s always the question of Vesuvius looming above.

    What I saw in Naples and what excited me the most was life unfolding in a continuous present. Damascus had a similar feel, but lacking the lively social give-and-take. History is not a frozen backdrop but a living participant in the present. The city’s streets compress centuries of urban life into a narrow, vertical spaces in which architecture, religion, commerce, and society are densely layered and constantly in motion. Everyday life spills outward from apartments and courtyards onto sidewalks, alleys, and piazzas, turning public spaces into hybrid spaces of living rooms, marketplaces, and theatres. It’s a feeling that I’ve fractionally experienced in other cities, but nothing like what washed over us in Naples.

    A city built for the street

    Naples’ street culture is inseparable from its urban fabric, especially in the historic center. Narrow streets and tall palazzi push life outward: balconies overhang the stone alleys, laundry stretches from window to window, and voices carry easily across the void. The result is a public realm where boundaries between inside and outside are porous, and where residents use doorsteps, stoops, and thresholds as extensions of domestic space.

    ▲ All the Neopolitan elements of street decoration. Diego Maradona hovers above it all.

    Rituals, religion, and everyday devotion

    Street shrines – dedicated to the Madonna, local saints, and more recently figures like Diego Maradona – punctuate corners and facades, anchoring a popular religiosity that is both deeply felt and casually integrated into routine. Grief and celebration remain visible rather than privatized. Processions, move through the same streets that serve as commercial arteries, briefly reorganizing traffic and commerce around communal rites.

    ▲ Mourners on the street outside a church waiting for the hearse.

    Commerce, food, and the social economy

    Street-level culture in Naples is also a culture of commerce, from formal shops along Via Toledo and other main arteries to informal stalls, barrow vendors, and door-front sellers. Food is central: pizza al portafoglio, fried snacks, and pastries are eaten on the move, reinforcing an urban tempo in which eating, talking, and walking blur into a single activity. Small businesses – tailors, repair shops, artisan workshops – often have doors flung wide open, allowing passersby to watch work in progress and which favors a network of long-standing relationships.

    Noise, performance, and conflict

    Sound is one of the principal mediums of Neapolitan street life: motor scooters, shouts, arguments, laughter, and music densely fill the acoustic space. Conversation easily becomes performance; the theatricality has roots in a real culture of gestural communication and public argument, where disagreement is aired loudly but does not always imply rupture.

    Graffiti, stickers, and visual claims

    Walls, shutters, and street furniture function as a visual gallery of tags, murals, stickers, posters, and hand-painted signs, through which individuals and groups claim presence and allegiance. Football imagery – especially around Maradona and SSC Napoli – intertwines with political symbolism, memorials, and commercial advertising, producing surfaces that narrate loyalties, losses, and local pride. Municipal regulation and cleanup are uneven, so these layers are rarely erased; instead, they accumulate, reflecting a city in which informal expression is both tolerated and expected as part of the everyday street-level environment.

    ▲ Street Shrine to the Madonna
    ▲ Instructional plaque below the shrine admonishes: “Let’s at least respect the Madonna”. Below it, in answer, but crossed out: “What the Hell?” or “What the fuck?”

    Return to North America

    There’s almost no obvious overlap between Naples and Montreal. If I pulled my car out into an intersection and acted like a normal Neopolitan driver, I would so shock my fellow Montrealers that counseling teams would be called in by arriving cops, to say nothing of where I’d end up. But even though we sit like silent glum blobs glued to our phones while we ride our public transport, I still ask if we’re not chronically depressed because we don’t have an easy life dealing with northern-latitude weather. There’s no light a lot of the year and grocery stores ask high prices for food that in Naples would be classified as road kill. If we were en masse moved south and fed the foods of Italy I could see us lighting right up – sparking around with high energy collisions off each other and making noise in the metro. We have the spirit, just not the environment. Watch out, dear residents of Naples!