Frances and I got back from Italy yesterday. It was an incredible and inspiring trip. Our heads are bursting with ideas for Beauty's. Here are a few of the over one thousand photos we took. Be sure to look at the larger versions of the photos to see more detail.

Our trip started in Rome.

Since our room wasn't free until noon we dropped our bags off and walked to St. Peter's. After climbing St. Peter's and still exhausted from the flight we eagerly sat down at the first restaurant we spotted ready to eat pizza! We didn't see an oven, and when we read the menu carefully we saw a note that the pizza was the frozen type...so we decided to skip pizza for our only time during the trip and have pasta.

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After a nap we ventured out and had our first of many pizza slices from a hole in the wall shop on Corso Vittorio Emanuelle. We showed how big a piece we wanted and the counter woman cut a piece that size and charged us by weight. This was perfect for Frances and me because we could sample all different kinds of pizza without getting too full.

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Our very first slice of pizza in Italy did not disappoint—delicious—anchovies, lettuce and olive oil.

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Our second slice was from a shop on the next block and was just as good. The fresh mozzarella cheese melted a bit when our slice was heated and combined with the arugula and cherry tomatoes. There is something really good about arugula on pizza. I'm eager to make a Beauty's special pizza with arugula and find out if our customers like the taste.

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Here you can see the counter woman weighing our slice of pizza. Each pizza had a price per kilogram. I really like how you can eat exactly the amount you want and try different slices...we're even trying to figure out if we could rearrange how we do our takeout orders at Beauty's to offer the same thing.

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We didn't try this one...but it sure looks good!

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That night we headed to Piazza Campo De Fiori for our first sit down pizza. Campo De Fiori is a lively area at night!

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I ordered a Margarita pizza with real Mozzarella di Bufala (Mozzarella cheese made from buffalo milk instead of cow milk) and Frances ordered a pizza with "Salsiccia Piccante" which we thought sounded really exciting but turned out to be pepperoni! Both pizzas were great...we loved the very thin crust, and nothing beats fresh mozzarella and fresh basil. If you've been to Europe you know that pizzas are pretty much all individual sized and you slice them yourself at the table. My pizza was 9 euros and Frances' was 8.50 euros. That was something like $23 for both pies. Overall we found prices in Italy to be really high, especially with the bad exchange rate right now.

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Here is the pizza maker...a gentleman from Egypt who has been in Italy for around 6 years.

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We saw this in a bunch of shops...if you look at the large picture you can see that the roots of the basil are wrapped and sitting in water. I guess this keeps the basil leaves fresh. Perhaps something for us to try at Beauty's. If you've stopped by our shop recently you may have noticed some new pots in our windowsill—we are growing our own basil!

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Here is a pizza in the oven. The oven was gas fired. Because of the temperature and very thin crust the pizza cooked in less than three minutes.

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I'd always heard that it's much easier to get mozzarella cheese made from buffalo milk in Italy. We walked into a medium sized grocery store and sure enough they had several types of "mozzarella di bufala."

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The next night we went searching for a certain pizzeria recommended in our guidebook. We ended up staring through the window of this small chain pizzeria called Pizza Re. The pizza looked good...and we were having no luck with our search...so we ate there. Here you can see one of the pizza makers drizzling olive oil on a pizza.

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Frances ordered the Vegetarian, a white pizza with artichoke hearts, pepper, eggplant, hot pepper and tomatoes.

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I had the Forte...salami, peppers, black olives and hot peppers...this was a deliciously spicy pie. If you look closely you'll see that the olives are not pitted.

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Rosa Maria Chirico, the owner of our bed and breakfast (which we can highly recommend if you want to stay near the Vatican), told us that her favorite pizzeria is La Focaccia. We knew that La Focaccia is located at Via della Pace 11 near Piazza Navona...but it still took us well over an hour to find the place! It didn't help that the only "sign" was the business card taped to the door as you can see in the picture below.

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We got to La Focaccia around 5 PM. They were in the middle of making dough and wouldn't open until after 7 PM. We wandered back to Piazza Navona and had a salad at one of those expensive tourist restaurants with great front row seats on the piazza.

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Back at La Focaccia a few hours later we watched the pizza maker make my pizza. I'm not sure why it was heart-shaped because the other pizzas we saw were round. Speaking of other diners, we knew we might be in for a treat when we overheard the British couple next to us mention that this was their third night in a row eating there. In a city filled with restaurants that definitely says something!

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Here's my pizza...and it was delicious. All factors combined...crust, toppings, sauce, cheese...this was my favorite pizza of the whole trip.

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Now from the best pizza to the absolute worst. Our first night in Venice we ate at a tourist trap restaurant just opposite the S. Zaccaria vaporetti (water bus) stop. Everything was wrong with this pizza...the crust, the sauce and especially the toppings. This was the only pizza the whole trip that I didn't finish! As you can see Frances chose spaghetti...a wise move!

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These little things were great...we stopped for a snack on The Lido (do you say "on"?)...and these "pizza sfoglia" were something like mini-deep dish pizzas with very buttery crusts.

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Not wanting to repeat our mistake from the night before in Venice, we went searching for Il Refolo, a pizzeria highly recommended by our guidebook. Frances was almost ready to kill me after I insisted we get off the vaporetti several stops early and take a shortcut by walking through the maze of streets...and instead lead us in a circle to a vaporetti stop two earlier than where we got off! Notice the zucchini in the picture. Zucchini was a common topping on many pizzas in Italy and it's something we want to try at Beauty's.

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We were very excited that all of the other patrons at Il Refelo were speaking Italian. It seemed that tourists outnumbered locals just about everywhere, but here we felt we would have more of an authentic experience. In that spirit we copied a table near us and ordered the bruschetta. We were very pleased when the next group of diners to sit down looked at our bruschetta and ordered that as well.

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Both of our pizzas were great. I went with a spicy meat pizza again, and Frances had a white vegetarian pie.

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We had a half hour to change trains in Milan and wisely used the time to sample some pizza! Here's the slice we ended up eating. It was incredibly greasy and had too much cheese for our liking...but the sauce was spicy...a bit like our putanseca sauce...and overall delicious.

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Here is the pizza we would have tried, but they brought it out after we bought our slice and we had to rush back to the train station.

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This place was amazing. We actually ate there two days in a row, but I didn't have my camera the first day. We were walking in Rapallo and were drawn to Il Focacciaio by smell.

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They were making only three things and selling them in slices by weight as quickly as they came out of the oven. They made a standard pizza, Focaccia Formaggio, and Focaccia Pizzata. The pie shown here is Focaccia Pizzata. Both types of Focaccia were topped with an incredibly good but very "liquidy" cheese.

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Here's a picture of Focaccia Formaggio.

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Here's a picture of Focaccia Pizzatta. This tasted much, much better than it looks in the picture :).

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After navigating through Florence without a map in a car I could barely drive (first time driving stick) we somehow made it to the center of the city. We were hungry and these pizzas at the first place we walked into looked good...

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..actually looks can be deceiving and there was nothing tasty about these slices...but we finished them anyway because we were hungry, and the two slices with an iced tea came to 10 euros or around $13!

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Later in Florence were attracted to this outdoor tourist trap restaurant by this man singing.

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Our waiter asked us to email him this picture...

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Naples—the birthplace of pizza—was our last stop. Here you can see a pizza maker making three pizzas. Sauce...

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Cheese...

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Olive Oil...and notice the zucchini again...

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One interesting thing we saw all over Italy is that they make the pizzas on the counter and then slide them onto the peel rather than placing the stretched dough on the peel first and then adding the sauce and toppings. This probably works because the pizzas are all individual sized and therefore easy enough to move around even with toppings.

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The oven...wood fired...

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We had dinner at Brandi which was started in 1780 and invented the Margherita pizza in 1889! The Margherita pizza...the basis of most pizzas across the whole world...was created to symbolize the Italian flag with tomatoes for red, basil for green, and mozzarella cheese for white. All of this left us wondering if we could come up with an innovation at Beauty's that would spread to the whole world within 100 years.

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We both decided to have classic pizzas. Frances ordered the Quattro Stagione (four seasons).

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I ordered the Margherita...it was the perfect way to end our trip to Italy.

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