It has been the honor of a lifetime to represent the University of Notre Dame and Pizzatown at the 2026 Caputo Cup in Naples, Italy, during the 23rd annual Trofeo Caputo: The Art of the Neapolitan Pizzaiuolo.
That still feels a little strange to write. Pizzatown started as a way to chase pizza stories with a camera, a notebook, and a lot of appetite. Notre Dame gave this trip a bigger frame. Naples gave it the reason.
The Caputo Cup is not a normal food event where everyone smiles, trades business cards, and goes home with a tote bag. It is loud, serious, crowded, generous, and deeply Neapolitan. You feel the competition, but you also feel the pride underneath it. Flour, ovens, trophies, flags, chefs, families, old hands, young pizzaiuoli trying to prove something. The whole room is built around a simple idea that is not simple at all: pizza is craft.
Naples makes that impossible to forget. The city does not treat pizza like a trend. It treats it like language. You see it in the old streets, in the speed of the counters, in the way people argue about details that outsiders would miss entirely. Dough is not just dough here. Heat is not just heat. A pizzaiuolo is not just someone who makes dinner.
True Neapolitan pizza is a southern Italian contribution to the world, and the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo is recognized on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. That matters because the point is not nostalgia. The point is continuity. A living tradition has to keep moving without being flattened into a commercial product with the soul sanded off.
That is what pulled the trip toward a documentary.
We went to Naples for the competition, but the story got bigger the second we arrived. The Caputo Cup is a stage, yes, but it is also a doorway into the people who keep this craft alive. The work is physical. The standards are unforgiving. The pride is everywhere. And the best parts are not the polished parts. They are the moments between: the setup before the floor fills, the half-second look before a pie goes into the oven, the hand gestures, the jokes, the nerves, the quiet respect people have for the old ways even when they are trying to make something new.
The competition floor had its own weather. Rows of stations, banners hanging from the ceiling, ovens waiting, flour everywhere, people moving like they had rehearsed the chaos. It looked organized from a distance. Up close, it was all tiny decisions. How long to open the dough. How much restraint with toppings. When to turn. When to pull. When to trust your hands instead of your anxiety.
That is the part of pizza Pizzatown cares about most. Not just where to eat, although we love that part too. We care about the human work behind the pie: the lineage, the stubbornness, the local character, and the weird little choices that make one place different from another. In Chicago, that can mean tavern-cut squares, deep dish arguments, old-school ovens, and neighborhood loyalty. In Naples, it means standing closer to the source and realizing how much there still is to learn.
There is a global story inside that room. People came from far beyond Naples to measure themselves against a Neapolitan standard. That could sound rigid from the outside, but inside the event it felt more alive than that. A standard gives the work something to push against. It gives everyone a shared language. Then each pizzaiuolo still has to stand at the bench and make the thing with their own hands.
The trophies were everywhere, and they mattered. Competition gives the event its shape. But the better story is what the trophies point toward: a community orbiting one very specific tradition. People came to measure themselves against a standard, not because a standard makes the work smaller, but because it gives the work a target.
That tension is the documentary: Naples as a place, pizza as a craft, competition as pressure, tradition as something alive enough to argue with.
We are not trying to make a commercial for pizza. We are trying to make a record of what it felt like to be there, to walk into that room, to represent Notre Dame and Pizzatown, and to meet a tradition on its home ground. The film will follow the trip, the competition, and the larger question sitting underneath it all: how do you honor something old without turning it into a museum piece?
There is no place on earth quite like Naples, and there are no people like Neapolitans. The city has its own gravity. Ancient, funny, intense, beautiful, impatient, magical. It does not explain itself for visitors. It just moves, and if you are lucky, you catch enough of the rhythm to understand why this pizza could only have come from here.
Special thanks to the Franco Institute at the University of Notre Dame for believing in the project and helping make the trip possible.
Documentary forthcoming. Trust in the Crust.
