it looks like a painting, and it's a marinara

A red base, thin, with the edge charred the way Roman pizza wants it. On top, scattered without any precise symmetry: red and yellow confit cherry tomatoes, anchovy fillets, capers, little leaves of fresh oregano, a few dots of pale cream, and a dark olive powder falling over everything like black pepper. No mozzarella, nothing to cover. I look at it before biting and it seems a painting more than a pizza.

It's the marinara of Luca Pezzetta, the Roman pizzaiolo who opened here in Isola not long ago, and the base is his: round, rolled thin with a pin, crisp, with that low charred edge that doesn't leave the puffed rim of the Neapolitan. It bends slightly under the weight of the topping, but under the teeth it cracks.

At the first bite the thing that comes is the saltiness. The olive powder, the capers and the anchovies all push in the same direction, a decisive, full salt that fills the mouth at once. Then the confit tomatoes come in, and the conversation changes. The red brings acidity, the yellow a lower, rounder sweetness, and together they whip the salt, cut it, put it back in line. Not a corner left empty, it's full, savoury, complete.

And here's the thing turning over in my head while I eat. The marinara is the poorest pizza there is, the one with nothing on top, tomato and oregano and that's it, the one ordered when someone really wants to know whether a pizzaiolo can make dough, because there's no mozzarella to cover the mistakes. It's the test pizza, the bare one.

To take it and make a painting of it, tomatoes placed one by one, two colours answering each other, the anchovies and olives and oregano laid down like brushstrokes, and still not stop being a marinara, doesn't happen often. It stays poor in its idea and turns rich to the eye, and the cleverest part is that neither of the two eats the other. Under all that drawing, the flavour is still the dry, direct one of the simplest pizza in the world.