Old Forge, Pizza Capital of the World
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
Old Forge, a small borough just south of Scranton, claims the title of Pizza Capital of the World, and has the pizzerias to back it up. The story begins in the early nineteen hundreds, when Italian immigrants, most from a mountain town called Felitto near Salerno, arrived to work the anthracite coal mines. After long shifts underground they would gather at taverns to eat.
Around the nineteen twenties, a woman named Filomena Ghigiarelli began baking a simple pizza in rectangular pans at her husband's bar: thick dough, garden tomatoes, local cheese. The miners loved it. The style spread from kitchen to kitchen, block to block.
Today, with a pizzeria on nearly every block of Old Forge itself and roughly one hundred sixty across Lackawanna County, the rectangular tray pizza born in an immigrant coal-town bar has outlasted the mines by a century.
