Barbara, Luciano and Albert: how the «Top» guide to the best pizzas in the world was born

«The pizza is Italian, Neapolitan par excellence, why not do something to promote it?». This is the question with which Luciano Pignataro, Albert Sapere and Barbara Guerra met. It was 2014 and it all started with a phone call and the idea of ​​starting with a guide. Today that guide, officially born in 2017, has become a famous brand and has many innovations in the pipeline: 50Top Pizza becomes world wide and therefore it will be an official ranking of the best pizzerias in the world (and not only Italian, as in previous years). But there will also be 50Top Pizza Pacific: Asia, Japan and Oceania will no longer be separated, but will be considered as one region, Pacific precisely. The area will include: Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand and Thailand.

That’s not all: a new guide will be born, the 50Top Italy Luxury: The Best of Gourmet Hospitality in Italy. That is, a ranking by hotels, relais, charming residences, or to your own
they also have a high-level restaurant and a standard food & beverage service
high. And this year there are also contests related to giving a voice to young talents in the world of catering in four different areas: First Course of the Fields; Bread Project; Italian brunch and finally Veggie Style – The Other Face of the Sandwich. In short, a big expansion.

But who are the three curators or gourmands of this guide really?

There is work and love involved, as in any compelling story, a pinch of luck and a good hand of fate. Barbara Guerra and Albert Sapere met in the town of Paestum and were working on tourism promotion. In the homeland of buffalo mozzarella and good food, it was easy to point to events that, among the columns of ancient Poseidonia, with the magnificent background archaeological parktold the good living of the territory.

And here, elbow to elbow and fork after fork, love is born between the two. And in 2018 the first edition of Le Strade della Mozzarella, an innovative format that is still very topical today: on stage pizza makers and chefs from Italy and from all over the world they told their dishes by interpreting in a creative way the buffalo mozzarella from Campania, which in Paestum has one of its most important principals.

Meanwhile Luciano Pignataro, pen de The Morning of Naples, marks the first “light” page dedicated to catering in the newspaper, the first in Southern Italy to foresee it. At the same time, like a game, he opened his blog 20 years ago, one of the first to talk about food.

The meeting is inevitable and the connections immediately evident. On Christmas Eve 2014 the idea of ​​the most creative of the three, Albert Sapere, decides to put pizza chefs on the pedestal: this is how 50Top Pizza, in 2018the first online guide dedicated to the world of pizza. Barbara and Albert today are only working partners and carry on together with Luciano Pignataro one of the most followed guides in the world of food. Top, certainly.