In 1959, Antonio Mizzoni brought his family to Dublin from the Italian village of Casalattico.He was far from the only Italian to make that journey: famous Irish-Italian families the Fuscos, Cafollas, Morellis and Macaris all come from the same small corner of Italy, halfway between Rome and Naples. The village even has an Irish festival every summer to celebrate the connection.
Like many of the other Casalattico families, the Mizzonis worked in and then ran a series of chippers, but it wasn’t until the early 1970s that pizzas came into the equation. That’s when Antonio decided to try out his favourite delicacy on his customers, setting up a pizzeria next door to the Amalfi chipper that he ran on the Rathgar Road.When Antonio’s son Aurelio was a teenager, his first job was to make pizzas in the shop. “It didn’t go too well!” says Aurelio of Dublin’s first pizzeria. “Nobody had a clue what a pizza was in Dublin. People were like, ‘What the hell is that?!’. You’d try to explain to them: ‘It’s an open pie’.”Nowadays with over 37 Mizzoni shops all over Ireland ,he says that “it’s the nearest thing you can get” to a genuine Italian pizza in Ireland.“We’re still using the same pizza sauce recipe that my father brought over from Italy,” he says, “and we’re still using the same dough recipe he brought over.Mizzoni’s opened in Tralee at the Horan centre in late March , just when Ireland was going into lockdown , but their takeaway pizzas have been flying out the door since then .”Our most popular Pizza has to be our Wagon Wheel , its probably the biggest pizza around “ says Paulina from Mozzoni’s in Tralee.
So head down over to Mizzoni’s at the Horan centre and see can you handle ‘The Wagon Wheel ‘
Photo shows Paulina helping her team get the huge Wagon Wheel Pizza boxes ready for the weekend …and that famous dough !
