Under the Blue Skies of Naples

Book excerpt: Mark Vitelli, age 25, scion of a successful manufacturer of pizza: The Perfetto Pizza Company of Milwaukee, is deputized by his father to introduce the fast food pizza to Italy beginning in Naples. He is in charge of six huge refrigerated containers of pizza dough, and thousands of frozen individual pizza pie samples stowed in the refrigerated hold of a freighter whose direct port of call is Naples. On landing, Mark is greeted by Katerina Smith, a rep of the Wall Street underwriter of this enterprise. The proposal meets with violent opposition by two groups: The Anti-Blue Sky (anti cielo azzurro) movement that wishes to violently disassociate Naples from folklore kitsch and emblematic buffoonery of the pizza mystique. Their manifesto reads radically like that of the once Italian Futurists, the Anti-Blue Sky wish is to drag Naples into the 21st Century, an example: that the Sorrentine Peninsula be turned into a Silicon Valley, etc. Another group objecting is the Slow Food Movement against fast food emporiums, especially shoddy pizza palaces in the environs of Naples, and the cielo azzurro Pro-Blue Sky is championing the ancestral culture and charms of Naples. Mark, after many hilarious tries is blocked which leaves him footloose in Italy.