Totò Sapore e la magica storia della pizza is a 2003 Italian animated film, with some dialogues made in Neapolitan, directed by Maurizio Forestieri and distributed by Medusa Film and Lanterna Magica. The film is loosely based on the novelIl Cuoco prigioniero by Roberto Piumini. Naples, eighteenth century. Salvatore "Totò" Sapore, an unemployed minstrel, always manages to cheer up the hungry with his songs about good food. He seems to be the one reason of the typically happy and euphoric Neapolitan temperament and this upsets Vesuvia, a magma witch who lives inside the Vesuvius. The evil witch decides to provide the poor minstrel with everything he wants and to suddenly take it all away from him, thus extinguishing the very last sparkle of joy in the city. To reach her devious goal, Vesuvia sends her clumsy, wannabe-actor servant Vincenzone to Naples, where he dresses up like an American lawyer and gives Totò a fake inheritance, consisting on nothing more than three old pots. Then he scares the horse of a beautiful French girl, Confiance, so that it runs in the wrong direction, thus allowing the encounter between the pretty girl and Totò, who instantly falls in love with her. The couple also saves a masked, hungry man called Pulcinella, who risked his life just to reach a nest of eggs on a cliff. After that, the girl is called by a man's voice and goes away in a rush, while Totò and Pulcinella stick together and start cooking the eggs, just to find out that the inherited pots are alive and magical. In fact, they can turn anything into a delicious meal. Totò decides to use this magical gift to help the needy, but Vesuvia sees to it that he's hired at Court. There he meets Mestolon, a nasty French cook who also happens to be Confiance's stepfather. Mestolon is very jealous of Totò, so he teams up with Vincenzone and boycotts a feast for the French royal family, which ends in a declaration of war to the Kingdom of Naples. Pulcinella suggests that if the king and queen of France have declared war for a revolting luncheon, a nice meal will end the battle. So Totò, Pulcinella, Confiance and the pots convince the people of Naples to enter the Vesuvius and to invent a new meal with the few ingredients they still have. After defeating Vesuvia, the Vesuvius becomes nothing more than a huge, innocuous oven, in which pizza is prepared for the very first time. After eating the first pizza in history, the king of France decides to end the war. In the end Totò and Confiance get married, as do Fefè and Scorfanette.
