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This is what pizza looks like in NaplesDomini Clark/The Globe and Mail

Dispatch is a series of first-person stories from the road. Readers can share their experiences, from the sublime to the strange.

My wife and I are determined to have a genuine Naples made-from-scratch margherita pizza for lunch. We find a tiny non-touristy establishment known as Vesi Pizza, established in 1921. It's cramped, spare, and filling fast with locals.

And it's a well-deserved break.

So far throughout our stay, Naples gets mixed reviews. A grubby port city, its thoroughfares are clots of small cars with large horns and intolerant drivers, the whole made worse by the fact that it is drizzling rain. The smaller alleyways are slipstreams for frantic pedestrians, cellphones to ears, mixed with reckless Vespas with minds of their own. Most sidewalks are littered with recyclables and garbage. The old brick-and-stone walls have succumbed to eight-foot-high grotesque graffiti.

We find ourselves in the university district, where every other shop is a bookstore and the ones in between are photocopying services or ready-made pizza joints. An anomalous music store is tended by an ancient, stooped Neapolitan, barely visible among his stacks of music scores that, on closer inspection, are miniature apartment blocks for silverfish. Across the street, the Conservatory of Music offers a rare refuge from the student crowds. Its large quadrangle has four storeys of open windows, which broadcast the cacophony of collective practice. On one side, a pianist is struggling with a Mozart sonata. Opposite him another piano sounds to me like Scriabin. Somewhere in the middle, a bassist and a kettle drummer are duking it out.

But this wild, dirty city is blessed with incredible history and great food. That's what makes it fascinating. So we escape into Vesi Pizza amidst the students piling in for lunch. I position my chair to give me an unobstructed line of sight into the kitchen and the hemispherical wood-fired oven, with its little inverted U-shaped opening. To get the pizza in and out, there are two metal spatulas at the end of broom handles – technically called "peels." The oversized, larger, rectangular one is used for inserting the floppy raw pizza, whereas the smaller, round one is for moving the pizzas around on the bricks, and taking out the stiff finished product.

Halfway through my wine, I see our order on the round peel being removed from the oven. The pizza is, let's say, 40-centimetres in diameter, whereas the circular peel is about 20 cm. Moreover, the pizza is at an angle to the floor, off centre, and on the move.

Immediately, I am reminded of one of the simplest, and most elegant Olympic three-metre springboard dives – the "half gainer," which can be done in either the pike or layout position. I prefer the layout, because, when performed by an expert, it is a slow-motion aerial ballet, so unlike the triple-twisting, double-back somersaults, whose rotational speeds reduce the diver to a visual blur. For the half gainer, the diver heads off the board frontward with a high vertical leap, and then, slowly, giving the illusion of stalling in mid-air, rotates backward to face the board upside down in a graceful arc, before descending headfirst into the water. Were the trajectory extended below the pool it would end, straight as a ruler, like a surveyor's plumb-bob, at the centre of the Earth. If executed perfectly, the entry produces a quiet, nearly splashless, soft sucking "swoof."

And so it is with our pizza. It leaves the peel, somehow rises a bit above the chef's shoulder, completes a 180-degree rotation, and lands upside down on the floor with a faint slapping sound – exactly parallel to the tiles. I would have scored it a 9.5.

There follows an awkward moment as the chef, peel blade on the floor like a little kid with a tiny snow shovel, gingerly lifts the edge of the margherita to assess his predicament, taking into account the surface quality of the kitchen floor, the adhesive nature of tomato, mozzarella and basil, the profit margin of his pizzeria and the observational skills of his only two foreign patrons. His eyes then flick toward me, and he knows I saw it all. I am nudging my wife, Christine, and pointing. The jig is up. He scoops the pizza into a bin.

It had taken a while to make the pie, so we are a little frustrated that we will have to wait for the second attempt. The place is now full of customers, all tables taken, some hopefuls stand at the door.

Our second pie arrives without incident. È delizioso! But the chefs have ramped up production and the kitchen looks frantic. We order more wine, and watch. I'm thinking I could get to see another of my favourite dives.

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