In Civitavecchia, for breakfast on Easter Sunday, you can not miss the traditional Easter Pizza, which accompanies, instead of bread, boiled eggs, salami and coratella with artichokes. The ingredients are flour, eggs, sugar, butter, sheep’s ricotta, cinnamon, aniseed, vanilla, wine or vermouth (or rum, alchermes, marsala, sambuca) and yeast. Cinnamon, anise seeds and sambuca are the ingredients that distinguish the Pizza of Civitavecchia from other similar sweets, typical of the surrounding area. To make the cake tastier, usually, after cooking, it is made to rest for a week. The dough, in the past, was treated by women with great care: it was placed on a bed and wrapped in woolen blankets. . The wait for the leavening was a ritual: the women remained awake at night watching the leavening and used to heat the blankets with hot irons so as to keep the temperature constant.
Currently, the Pizza is on sale at some artisan bakeries and pastry shops in Civitavecchia, but the real Easter Pizza is mostly “homemade”.
