Largest pizza

A team in Rome baked a gluten-free pizza covering 1,261.65 square metres in December 2012. It was served in slices to the crowd.

Context

The pizza, nicknamed Ottavia, was assembled on 13 December 2012 at the Nuova Fiera di Roma exhibition centre. It was a circle about 40 metres across, and its area of 1,261.65 square metres is consistent with that diameter. A team of specialist chefs working for the event organiser NIPfood spent more than 48 hours preparing it.

The dough used over 9,000 kilograms of gluten-free flour. The event was meant to raise awareness of coeliac disease, a condition in which gluten damages the gut, which is why the pizza was made entirely without gluten. Guinness describes it as the largest pizza ever made.

It beat a record set in 1990 at a hypermarket in South Africa, a pizza about 37.4 metres across that used ordinary flour. That earlier pizza was smaller in diameter, so the Rome attempt won by a clear margin. Records like this are judged on verified size and on the pizza being cooked and edible, not on how many slices are served.

The record is a useful reminder that Guinness separates categories: this entry is the largest pizza of any kind, and it happens to be gluten-free. Other claims, such as the longest or largest pizza by other rules, are tracked as separate records.