Where did Julia Roberts eat pizza in Naples?
Julia Roberts ate at L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele in Eat Pray Love, filmed on site in 2010. Here is the queue, the ticket system and the margherita price.
Da Michele had a reputation long before any film crew arrived. Two pizzas on the menu, marble tables, tickets called out by number, a room that has been in the same place since 1930. Then Eat Pray Love put it on screen in 2010, and a working neighbourhood pizzeria acquired a queue that now stretches around the corner most days of the year.
Which pizzeria is in the Eat Pray Love scene?
The pizzeria is L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele, on Via Cesare Sersale in Naples. The 2010 adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir filmed the scene on location, and one report notes the pizzeria closed for a day of production. Julia Roberts' character orders a margherita and delivers the line about having a relationship with this pizza.
The choice was not random. Da Michele was already the pizzeria that Neapolitans sent visitors to when they wanted the argument settled: no toppings list, no photographs of the dish on a board outside, no attempt to be anything other than what it is. What the film added was global reach. The queue that formed afterwards has never really gone away.
What does da Michele actually serve?
Two pizzas. Marinara, which is tomato, garlic, oregano and oil with no cheese, and margherita, which adds mozzarella and basil. A margherita costs about €6.50 plus a cover charge of around €1. The kitchen has held that menu for generations, and the room on Via Cesare Sersale has been in use since 1930.
That restraint is the point. Both pizzas follow the same rules the city has argued over for a century: dough rested 8 to 24 hours, a ball of 200 to 280 grams opened to no more than 35 centimetres, then 60 to 90 seconds in a wood oven running at 430 to 480 degrees. The official specification for Neapolitan pizza reads like a technical document, and a two-item menu is the easiest way to hit it every time. If that discipline is the part that interests you, an afternoon at the oven with a pizzaiolo teaches more in three hours than any queue will.
| L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele | On the record |
|---|---|
| Menu | Marinara and margherita only |
| Margherita price | About €6.50, plus roughly €1 cover |
| Family origins | 1870, Michele Condurro |
| First dedicated shop | Around 1906 |
| Current room | Via Cesare Sersale, since 1930 |
| Queue system | Numbered ticket, called in order |
| Typical wait | 20 minutes off-peak, up to about 2 hours at peak |
| Guide listing | Included in the Michelin Guide Italia for 2026 |
| Screen credit | Eat Pray Love, 2010, filmed on site |
The Michelin listing is worth reading before you judge the price: the guide's own entry for da Michele treats it as a serious kitchen rather than a film location.
How long is the queue at da Michele now?
Expect 20 minutes at a quiet hour and up to about two hours at peak. Staff hand out numbered tickets at the door and call them in order, so you are not physically standing in a line the whole time. The middle of lunch and the start of the evening service produce the worst of it.
Naples has been absorbing more visitors every year, with roughly 15 million tourist stays recorded in 2025, and the famous addresses take a disproportionate share of that. The ticket system is the pizzeria's answer: take your number, walk five minutes, come back when it is close.
How do you eat there without losing a morning?
Arrive at opening or in the mid-afternoon gap, take a ticket immediately, then spend the wait somewhere useful instead of on the pavement. Order the marinara if you want to taste the dough rather than the cheese. Eat fast and give the table up. The whole meal is built to take twenty minutes.
The neighbourhood around Via Cesare Sersale is not a place most visitors would otherwise wander, which makes the wait feel longer than it is. Use it. There are pastry counters and coffee bars within a short walk, and the difference between a wasted hour and a good one is knowing which neighbourhood to eat in before you get there. If the fold is new to you, how to fold and eat one without cutlery covers the local method.
For anyone who would rather not gamble a lunch slot on a queue, a private guide with a fixed itinerary removes the problem entirely. See private dates for your group for the ten-tasting private walk, or look at the wider set of evening and private food walks we track, which run three to three and a half hours and cancel free up to 24 hours out.
Is the film pizzeria the best pizza in Naples?
It is the most famous, which is not the same thing. Da Michele belongs in the Michelin Guide and its margherita is a benchmark, but the city's competitive rankings are won by other kitchens. In the 50 Top Pizza World 2025 list, Diego Vitagliano tied 4th, 50 Kalò di Ciro Salvo placed 12th and La Notizia 53 placed 17th.
None of those sit on a film tourist's route, which tells you how deep the bench is here. The honest position: da Michele delivers an excellent, cheap, historically important pizza with a wait attached, and several Naples pizzerias will feed you better if you are willing to book and travel for it. Our ranking of where the pizza is actually best puts the famous rooms and the ranked ones side by side.
What if the wait is simply too long?
Then eat standing. A pizza a portafoglio, the folded street version, costs about €2 from a window on Via dei Tribunali and takes ninety seconds. It is the same dough, the same oven temperature and the same city, minus the ticket, the cover charge and the queue.
That is also the version with the better story attached. A two-euro pizza and a G7 summit explains how a US president ended up eating one on the street in 1994, and the three pizzerias a 2021 series filmed shows how differently the same dish behaves depending on which counter you order it from. Between them, you can eat four famous pizzas in Naples for under twenty euros, and only one of them costs you an afternoon.
