Pizza is one of the most popular meals in the world, and the United States even honors it with a day of its own that was just celebrated earlier this week, National Pizza Day - but now, a historian has uncovered a shocking truth about this popular Italian tradition, as the real pizza origins are different from its often-told history.

Throughout the history of the beloved Italian meal, a popular Naples legend has stated that the pizza origins are that, at the end of the 19^th century, a cook named Raffaele Esposito was commissioned to create a plate to honor then-Queen, Margherita.

The pizza origins legend says that Esposito created a number of plates to honor the Italian Queen, and among the, she chose a pizza pie that featured the colors of the Italian flag: the red from tomato sauce, green from basil and white from mozzarella cheese. This simple dish was then called "pizza Margherita."

Now, as The New Zealand Herald reports, it seems like the earliest uses of the word "pizza" go back almost a thousand years before the pizza origins were supposed to be, as church records have shown that there were mentions of the famous dish in the Dark Ages.

Of course, it has been known that even the ancient Greeks ate something similar to modern pizza, but Neapolitans have always taken pride in being the city that saw the invention of the contemporary version.

However, Vice reports that the aforementioned pizza origins story is far from reality, as an Italian food historian called Giuseppe Nocca is about to uncover his research regarding the famous plate, revealing that the birthplace of modern pizza isn't really Naples, but a small village in Lazio called Gaeta.

It seems that the true pizza origins go back to AD997, when a document declared that, on Christmas Day, the local bishop was to be provided with 12 pizzas, among other delicious treats. Indeed, it very much sounds like the Dark Ages!