Strictly authentic pizza is a dish of the very poor: bread dough, olive oil, tomato paste, and garlic, with all but the first being dispensable if finances do not permit. I believe you will find a description in Ann Cornelison’s _Women of the Shadows: A Study of the Wives and Mothers of Southern Italy_ (1976). Of course, to make it palatable to Americans, a good deal of meat, cheese, and fresh vegetables had to be added, and of course the traditional method of eating it broke down. Pizza as we know it was invented in America. Deep-dish pizza is simply an extreme case.

That is a common characteristic when various kinds of cuisine are converted for American consumption. one of the few exceptions I can think of is Tibetan cooking, where they have to take some butter out, to reflect the fact that the diners are not eating at an altitude of 15,000 feet. Perhaps similar considerations would apply if someone were to open an Eskimo restaurant.

A couple of years ago, the Italian state prosecutors managed to get a wiretap of one of Silvio Berlusconi’s call-girls talking to her girlfriend about one of Berlusconi’s orgies, and they published the tape. An excerpt was subsequently reprinted in Harpers magazine (April, 2011). In the recording, the call girl’s girlfriend wanted to know what the celebrants had had for dinner, and the call-girl responded: “Let’s say the emphasis was not exactly on food. The table was set nicely, but the food was very simple– well prepared, though. A caprese antipasto, a pasta, a good risotto, grilled chicken, a little [eggplant] Parmigiana,” and she went on to complain about the hopeless banality of Berlusconi’s tastes, that surely he could find something more interesting to eat than _that_. This is what _authentic_ Italian cooking looks like.

Interestingly, in Tomasi de Lampedusa’s _The Leopard_, the Italian _Gone With the Wind_, the Sicilian Prince of Salinas, a thinly disguised version of Lampedusa’s grandfather in the year 1860 at the time of the Risorgmento, does not carve a bird or a roast at table– he dishes out the minestrone soup. The soup is considered to be the dish of authenticity, which requires the hand of the paterfamilias.

I tracked down a couple of items in Berlusconi’s dinner which I did not know about, and I think it works out to someone like George Wallace or Strom Thurmond eating a traditional southern dinner consisting of fried chicken, and the usual fixings, viz: cole slaw, mashed potatoes, collard greens, black-eyed peas, and cornbread. Oh, and peach pie for desert. This is presumably the Italian equivalent. The whole idea is to stretch out a small quantity of chicken with a multitude of vegetable preparations of wildly varying taste.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risotto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmigiana
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprese_(gastronomia)