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9 February: what is celebrated today
9 February brings together two celebrations that, although born in different worlds, share the same cultural pulse: the pleasure of creating and passing things on. On the one hand, pizza—that universal icon capable of bringing together tables, cities and generations—claims its day with the joy of the everyday. On the other, the Greek language—one of the deepest roots of our culture—reminds us that everything we name has a history. A date that smells of freshly baked dough and sounds like ancient echoes: taste and word, tradition and cultural mixing.
World Pizza Day
Every 9 February, the world celebrates a dish that transcends borders, culinary arguments and passing fashions. Pizza, born from the popular Neapolitan tradition and now elevated by UNESCO to Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, is more than food: it is a social gesture, a meeting point, a symbol of gastronomic creativity. Its history is as vast as its variations, and its global success has something of an unlikely tale turned universal custom.
Modern pizza finds its founding myth in 19th-century Naples, when the pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito prepared the celebrated Margherita in honour of the queen visiting the city. With tomato, mozzarella and basil, that triangle of dough condensed the colours of a flag and the character of a people. But before that gesture there had been centuries of flatbreads covered with herbs, oils and cheeses in Persia, Greece and Rome: a humble invention that travelled through history before finding its definitive form.
Today pizza is an infinite catalogue of identities: from Neapolitan simplicity to Asian experiments, from the bold flavours of the Mediterranean to Polish street pizza and the aromatic versions of the Levant. It is chameleonic, democratic and constantly reinvented. Curious stories arise around it: centuries-old pizzerias, associations of master pizzaioli, extravagant records and even pizzas that reached the International Space Station. In short, a food that not only feeds, but celebrates everyday life in all its forms.
International Greek Language Day
The same 9 February is also dedicated to honouring a language that has shaped Western thought for more than forty centuries. International Greek Language Day recalls the death of the poet Dionisios Solomós, author of the Hymn to Liberty, and celebrates an idiom that shaped the philosophy, science, politics, tragedy and epic that defined our way of understanding the world. The Greek language is not merely a system of signs: it is an intellectual and emotional legacy.
Ancient Greek was the laboratory of reasoning, heroic narrative and public debate. Much of the scientific, philosophical and technical vocabulary we use today was born from it, as were syntactic structures that spread across Europe. The Cyrillic alphabet, medical terminology, astronomy, mathematics and logic all have visible roots in Greek. And yet the language remains alive in the voices of millions of contemporary speakers, in the echoes of the diaspora and in modern culture.
Paying it tribute also means remembering those who made Greek an inexhaustible vehicle for ideas: Homer and his epics, Aristotle and his intellectual system, Sappho and her lyrical voice, Plato and his dialogues, Sophocles and the tragedy that still resonates. Its influence continues in literature, cinema, philosophy, education and critical thought. This is why the day invites us not only to look back, but also to ask ourselves how language, any language, shapes our vision of the world.