Brazzi Brick Oven Pizza

The tradition was born on the sun-drenched inland of Sicily, where Marla Vaccarro was born in 1915. Her family tilled fields fragrant with wheat and tomatoes, and olives and figs. So when she married Francesco Castelli in 1935, it made perfect sense that their livelihood wouid come from the land itself.

Within a few years, the Vaccarro family opened a bakery in the small sea town of Porte Empeocle. Marie Vaccarro had five sons and four daughters and all of them worked in the good earth and in the bakery, which became known throughout southern Sicily and grew into a wholesale business that supplied restaurants throughout the region.

In 1955, the family brought its tradition of homestyle cooking and respect for good food to a new land - opening the first pizzeria of its kind in New York.

The children of Maria Vacoafro found the promise of America on Avenue U in Brooklyn, where they made specialîy pies that went far beyond the usual cheese and sausage varieties.

The business expanded to Long Island, where as many as 12 pizza stores flourished from Queens into Suffolk County. Now as Brazzi Brick Oven Pizzerie & Ristorante, a new chapter is being written in the annals of Maria Vacoarrds famiìy.

A third generation devotes themselves to pleasing the public in a tradition that goes back to a time of hand-ground wheat and hand-pressed olive oil to trees plentiful with figs and almonds and chestnuts, to tomatoes ripening beneath a sun that shines as it does no other place in the world.

A tradition of home-cooking and respect for good food. Buona appetito!