Pizza on Ice

So cosmopolitan and dilapidated, down to the very last brick. So graceful, with alleyways that wind their way over the hills, pretending to bring order to this wild romance of walls, marble and humanity. For some, the metropolis at the foot of Vesuvius is the raucous, chaotic maritime capital of the Old World, arguably the greatest of them all, until the plague came and halved it in size. For others, it is pure hedonism: a city of pizza and Capri, of sfogliatelle and espresso, of summer love and the homeless. It is the stuff of adventure novels; a portal to antiquity through which Homer’s poems entered Europe’s mainland – offering us life lessons that still hold weight today.

Painters like Lorrain and Catel were as giddy as children at the sight of the Gulf, finding it as therapeutic as an evening gazing over Rome or a morning skiing in the Alps. Naples is the present of a past that never quite passed, like Babylon or Nineveh. Even in writing, one falters in the face of its poetry of contrasts: the morning light and the evening haze, the world reborn here every single day. One falters because of the sheer excess – of life, of death, of wine and women, of contradictions between church and crime. Unteachable, ungovernable, anarchy and action.

Saints in neon lights, children bolting around, a woman in a red dress, a nonna lugging her shopping home, her bag bursting with tomatoes so red because everything else is so sooty black. Between them, three men on a scooter – horns blaring, shouts of Italian ricocheting down the alley. More scooters, superstition, earthquakes, the Camorra. Cables, washing lines, fairy lights, Maradona, awnings and rubbish that has been lying around here since the thirteenth century and by now is Naples. Then the nonna again, who is almost run over by the three men on the scooter, distracted by the woman in the red dress. The men’s looks are first angry and then kind, the women’s gazes an abyss into which you might fall and never surface from. The sight of the sea has coloured their eyes blue, despite their jet-black curls. It’s chaos in the alleyways, but to write of the alleyways you must write of the pizza, without the pizzas the alleyways don’t work. The city captivates you like body heat – intoxicating, human, radiant with hope. There is no pain here that has not already been suffered, and somehow, already overcome; no dream that has not already been dreamed before, and dreamed again. And so you surrender to the secrets of the alleyways, which present themselves disguised as coincidences. And across from it all, the deep-blue, unmoved and eternal sea, watched over by half-naked statues of women bearing lanterns.

If you befriend a real Neapolitan over a pizza – or simply in the pursuit of finding the best slice amid the glamour of this epidemic-prone city – you are swiftly introduced to such-and-such: you must eat here, try this, drink this and that. Before long, you’re in back rooms, riding motorbikes without a helmet, slipping into national monuments and palaces paid for with a wink, congratulating strangers at weddings, attending funerals and eventually, almost inevitably, finding yourself at one of Ciro Oliva’s tables.

There are many excellent pizzaioli in Naples, but this young pizza chef has no equal. Perhaps because he is Naples – no one channels the city’s electric energy like he does. A virtuoso with a love of detail, he leaps up from his chair mid-conversation, gesticulating as if he were in the third round of a boxing match. He burns with the kind of intensity most people only reach on cocaine. He’s the fourth generation in a family legacy that began in 1951 with a shoemaker whose wife, Donna Concetta, resourcefully concocted the recipe for ogge a otto – eat today and pay in eight days – to help her husband raise the family. At eighteen, Ciro took over the pizzeria named after his great-grandmother Concettina and quickly made a name for himself. Today, the boy from Sanità, with a heart full of passion and a head full of ideas, is considered the greatest pizza chef in the world. People arrive by helicopter for lunch. Footballers, celebrities, but Ciro treats everyone as if they were famous. I’ve eaten at his place a few times – with him, and without – but I’ll never forget the times we shared a table.

In 2023, Remo Ruffini bought 47.5% of Ciro’s pizzeria for millions. Jay-Z and Beyoncé allegedly flew him in (so the rumour goes) to bake pizza at a party. And now, the Kulm Hotel St. Moritz has honoured him with a pop-up during The I.C.E. 2025. So it seems only logical that Ciro would end up in St. Moritz sooner or later. Picture it: a lorry full of Neapolitans crossing the border with a pizza oven, crates of tomatoes and mozzarella in tow. A spectacle suspended between heaven and earth. Who would be mad enough to realise such a thing?

The Kulm, of course – and I don’t just say that because they pay me. The hotel’s culinary tentacles reach all over the world: from Sardinia to Capri, the mountains in the hinterlands of Provence to Saint-Tropez, Como, Tokyo, the Middle East, Asia. They offered their guests what they craved, sometimes before they even knew it themselves: an intangible world heritage site, Pizza on ice. And so, in February 2025, this crazy idea led to Neapolitan scenes outside the Chesa al Parc, from lunchtime until late afternoon.

Colourful branding on pizza boxes, shirts and jumpers lit up the mountain village. Yellow, blue and red are colours that stand out in the snow just like the tomatoes of Naples. People sat at tables, beaming. The hungry and unsatisfied ran to get another piece. Directeur d’Ambiance Arman Naféei took care of the rest, and the beautiful weather did its part. In front of the Chesa al Parc, the people didn’t just eat, they turned it into a real place. A slice of Ciro’s pizza in the mountains tastes like sfogliatella on a morning by the Gulf of Naples. No Sorrento or Capri on the horizon, but with Piz da la Margna in the distance and Piz Nair towering behind. The Maloja wind blew, not the Scirocco – although strictly speaking the Scirocco never actually blows, it pushes its way in, carrying wind from Africa lazily across the sea, holding on to the accumulated heat of the desert, always attempting to bring Naples to a halt and seduce it into an aperitivo.

The day draws to a close, a golden haze like the remains of daydreams. And in the end, all you can do is superstitiously and hopefully cling to myths, eat pizza, sip espresso with the old-timers, defy the ever-present death threat of Vesuvius with the fierce insistence of life and eat a margherita at the Concettina ai Tre Santi – or at 1,856 metres above sea level if you can’t make it to Naples. But if you’ve seen and tasted Naples and don’t love it – well, as the old-timers say, you’re welcome to die somewhere else.