Another thing that is different from the USA is that this actually a normal restaurant dish (just like your variety of pastas and lasagnas) and as such should be eaten with normal cutlery. The reason they don’t cut the pizza in slices is that yiou aren’t suposed to eat it with your hands…
This is common in most (if not all) of European Italian restaurants, delivered pizza’s are often sliced though.
This was pretty much my experience when I lived in Messina. Although I recall there being “standard” multi-topping pizzas, just not mix and match whatever toppings like in the US.
I would just add that the fundamental difference is that you CAN make basic assumptions when you order an American pizza, and you CANNOT when you order a pizza in Italy.
In America, it is implicit that your pizza will come with sauce and cheese, the sauce is probably a sweet, herby tomato, and that you build from there.
It Italy, all that is implied is that you will have something on flat bread. It might have sauce, it might not. It might have cheese, it might not. It might just be olive oil and rosemary (“pizza bianca” in Rome).
A second difference, noted upthread, is that pizzas in Italy are very rarely loaded with toppings as they are in America. One of my favorites from where I work is the local “pizza rustica” with tomato sauce, cheese, olive oil, oregano, anchovy, capers, and green olives. This pizza has all of about three or four olives, four anchovies, four or five capers, with a small dusting of oregano on top (the tomato sauce tastes like TOMATO, which is another difference) and a drizzle of olive oil.
I spent a semester in Rome during the early 90s. Pizza Rustica was pretty much the ubiquitous term for their version of pizza, which (as others have described better than I) was a thin, flaky bread crust with any variation of scanty toppings – or sometimes none at all. At the place my friends and I visited most frequently, you told the lady how many slices you wanted, and she’d snip them from the whole pie using a pair of heavy duty shears. Then she’d weigh them on a small scale, perform some kind of complex mathematical calculation that had something to do with the direction of the wind, the quality of your haircut, and how frequently you’d stopped by that week, before announcing the price. The best pizza we found was sold in a shop just outside of Stazioni Termini. It featured wedges of rosemary roasted potatoes.
I’d better stop. I’m getting Romesick again.
I’ve never been to Italy, but I’ve certainly watched enough cooking/travel shows to know that pizza in Italy is thin-crusted, crisp, light, and simply topped.
Behold a real pizza baker in Naples, the heart of pizza-dom in Italy, assembling some tasty creations (with the assistance of some delighted Australian tourists).