Angelo Rumolo

Born in 1990, Angelo Rummolo is a young pizza chef from Cilento, eager to work and clear headed. As his family being already in the business, after finishing catering school – in fact even earlier – he put his hands in the dough right away, in the family pizzeria - called Grotto Pizzeria Castello – his father and uncle opened in 1983 inside the charming castle of Caggiano. It is from his uncle, indeed, that Angelo learnt the fundamentals of pizza, the typical one of this area, slightly more crispy and “rustic” than the traditional Neapolitan one.

This young man, however, also loves Neapolitan pizza very much and when, a few years ago, he took over the dough, he started to fine tune a style of his own, the successful meeting between the tradition of Cilento and that of Naples: the dough is tasty, with a “homemade” flavour, and is slightly crispy outside while inside it is soft and bubbly as in the best Neapolitan pizzas. A curious experimenter, though rooted in his territory and its traditions, Angelo walks around woods and fields, picking wild asparagus, hazelnuts, mushrooms and truffles he uses to top his pizzas, he assimilates farmers’ customs from his grandfather – who until recently would take the sheep to graze – but visits starred restaurants too.

This is how he got to the pizza that granted him the first place in the "Pizza di Stagione" section of the Campionato mondiale del pizzaiuolo, the World pizza chef championship, which took place in September 2014 in Naples, called VL: the dough is black, thanks to vegetal carbon, the result of a collaboration with Vitantonio Lombardo, chef at Locanda Sanseverino - one Michelin star – 50 metres away from his pizzeria, who was already the author of "pizza in black" dedicated to Davide Scabin. The topping – potatoes cooked in ashes and then mashed, pancetta, scamorza from Caggiano and lots of black truffle – is inspired by a simple and delicious dish his grandfather used to make, to which Angelo added a little fresh truffle. Among his projects, there’s the opening of a new, just as typical, restaurant on the mountains of Cilento.