Per i napoletani mangiare la pizza è come fare l'amore

The Italians might be notorious for being great lovers and making sumptuous pizza, but to my knowledge the two things have never really been connected. Until now. One Simone Falco insists they're linked. He's the managing director of Rossopomodoro Pizzeria, and he has this to say:

Pizza is something you touch and share. You've got to treat a pizza like someone you want to make love to. The pleasure of eating it is just as much about how it feels as how it tastes.

A recent article in the Boston Globe suggests that eating pizza may well be a sensuous experience. The author of this particular piece describes how a woman in Naples:

... romanced her pizza: carefully cutting a slice, raising it on her fork, admiring it before she wrapped her lips around it. Chewing slowly, she savoured the pizza in her mouth, then closed her eyes to swallow before she smiled.

So surprisingly, he's not alone in his lusty reading of the joys of pizza-eating, but crucially, our pizza-loving woman used cutlery, contradicting Falco's other point, which is:

We make genuine Neapolitan pizza, and anyone from Naples will tell you, you don't eat pizza with a knife and fork. It's crazy using cutlery.

Yes, he is so convinced that pizza is the food of love he has decided to ban cutlery from every branch of Rossopomodoro so customers are forced to get their hands all over the doughy circles of loveliness. The management has even vowed to confiscate the offending implements should someone try and smuggle them in. What's he playing at with our knives and forks?

Rowan Walker for Guardian.co.uk