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Italy Beats Spain With 0.807 Mile Pizza World Record [Video]

By Anne Sewell
Published on: 08:11 PST, Jun 15, 2015

Can you imagine a pizza that literally goes on for almost a mile? All that cheesy delight spread over a 1.299 kilometer (0.807 miles) length makes for a pizza world record, clocking in as the world’s longest pizza ever.

It seems the Italians were going all out over the last weekend, retrieving Guinness World Records for two of their traditional food items. First, there was the record for the world’s largest Tiramisù, which was achieved Saturday, beating a record recently set in Bahrain. Now, it seems on Sunday they took back their record for the world’s longest pizza from Spain.

For anyone who is fond of these Italian delights, unless you were actually there at the time, this is surely sheer torture. First, a totally delicious dessert weighing in at 3,015 kilos (6,647 lbs), and now on Sunday there was an incredibly long (but admittedly rather narrow) pizza, measuring in at 1.299 kilometers (0.807 miles).

According to the Local, it took the pizza chefs in the Calabrian town of Rende 16 hours over this weekend to create the amazingly huge pizza, which has now smashed the record previously held by Spain.

How did they achieve this miracle? Apparently, they used a special oven with a roller inside and as the first part of the pizza was correctly baked, it was pulled out to sit on a table while the next section of pizza was cooked in the oven.

This went on almost ad infinitum until they had cooked the entire cheesy and delightful world’s longest pizza. World records are not easy to achieve, and things had to be accurately recorded, so there was a panel of judges involved, consisting of a solicitor, a lawyer, and a quantity surveyor (to survey the quantity of pizza, naturally) to verify the entire process from beginning of pizza to end, ensuring there was no cheating involved.

According to the Italian language news website Il Quotidiano del Sud, the pizza snaked through the streets of Rende, starting at Piazza San Carlo Borromeo and ending at Piazza Matteotti.

A huge crowd of 60,000 people gathered to watch the entire process. Some volunteered to help in the process, others just stared in amazement, and undoubtedly, everyone was there to eat the results of the pizza world record attempt.

The pizza just managed to pip the previous record held by the town of Tomellaso in Spain. Their attempt measured 1.141 kilometers (0.708 miles), and their pizza world record was achieved in 2011, involving more than 100 chefs and helpers.

However, while it’s great for the Italian town to achieve a pizza world record, it wasn’t just for the fun and food, as the event was set to raise money towards a shuttle bus for the disabled and elderly in the town to get around. The pizza world record was, thus, a good thing all round — or should we say long?

This is nothing new for Italy, however, as they also broke another record for the world’s largest pizza back in 2012, baking a more traditional round Margherita pizza measuring an amazing 130 feet wide.

Funny thing, though, as some bright spark has also announced the world’s smallest pizza on Twitter, too. Nah, let’s stick with the longest and biggest!

While we might think of pizza as being a thoroughly modern food, it seems the term was first recorded in the 10th century in a Latin manuscript from Gaeta, Italy. The more modern version was then invented in Naples between 1715 and 1725.

Feeling hungry, anyone? Fancy an almost mile long pizza for dinner tonight? And as for the previous winners of the pizza world record, it’s over to you in Spain! Beat that, amigos.

[Image: CC by 2.0 jeffreyw]

[Video: webiamo]

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