"Since I was 13, I've made 1.5 million": meet Mario, the pizza king for 50 years in Toulon

Good foot, good eye, good dough. Tireless. At 73, pizza king Mario Mari is still behind the wood-fired oven of the Taormina pizzeria he founded in October 1974, has since run with his family, and is preparing to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary with a flourish (and a year late).

Fifty years of pizza is worth celebrating!

More than that! I started making pizzas at the age of 13 and a half. At the school in La Seyne where I was enrolled, exasperated by my poor results, the principal said to me one day: "Bring me a work contract and I'll give you an exemption to leave school." My brother-in-law Léonard Palilla, who ran the pizzeria Le Relais in Sanary, hired me even though school was compulsory until the age of 14! I saw the principal again afterward, and he came to buy me some pizzas (laughs). Today, I estimate that I have made more than 1.5 million pizzas.

But for the fiftieth anniversary of the Taormina pizzeria, will the rue d'Urville be privatized?

It will be the fifty-first anniversary to be more precise. To celebrate this anniversary (as every ten years since the 30th anniversary), on Sunday, September 14, from 7 p.m. to midnight, near the pizzeria, we are privatizing a part of rue Dumont-d'Urville (last year it was under construction). It will be covered with a red carpet – a carpet 40m long and 4m wide! And we will offer (by invitation) an aperitif dinner to all our loyal customers, to please them. On stage, a group of musicians and singers (Synthèse) will liven up the evening. We are expecting 300 people. And I won't hide from you that at night, I sometimes wake up thinking about details that need to be taken care of...

Tell us about the creation of the pizzeria.

I opened it at the end of October 1974, with my sister Santina and still my brother-in-law (he retired in 1995) who left his establishment in Sanary which was too dependent on seasonality. It was a hair salon. We took down the front. It was October 16, 1974, the day of my 23rd birthday. I then slept there, in front of the oven. We cleared everything inside, brought out the brick walls, added beams... Since then, apart from the decoration made of second-hand objects – it's one of my passions – nothing has changed. Then we bought a place (a former insurance company) next door to use it as a wood store in particular. The oven consumes between 3 and 4 cubic meters of wood per month. This place also allows us to create a longer outdoor terrace.

And since then, it's been a successful business?

We chose a very busy place! At the time, thousands of people passed through on the way down to town from the train station, including many sailors. They were the ones who made our success in the first place. They ate at our place when they left and arrived. Friday, the day we went on leave, was our busiest day. By 6:30 p.m. it was full! Today it's still a busy place, but we have more of a regular clientele.

You also welcome a lot of artists and celebrities...

Since opening 13 years ago, we have become a bit like the "canteen" of the Liberté theater, not far from us, and welcome, in the evenings especially after their performances, the many artists who perform there.

Like who, for example?

Gad Elmaleh, Patrick Bruel, Emmanuelle Béart, Jane Birkin, Arianne Ascaride, Juliette Binoche, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Miss France 2011 Laury Thilleman… They are too numerous to mention but almost all appear in the photos that cover the walls of the pizzeria.

Do you recognize them all?

It depends ( laughs ). One evening, my wife innocently asked the former porn actress Katsumi, who had come to give a lecture: "Haven't I seen you somewhere before?" , triggering a fit of laughter from Charles Berling, director of the Liberté Theatre.

With this crowd, the evenings must drag on forever?

Now, due to show times, actors come to dinner earlier, but not long ago, tables of 30 people at midnight were not uncommon. One evening, with André Dussollier and his team, the evening degenerated into a musical blind test and then dancing until 4 a.m.!

In short, a life under the sign of pizzas...

You could say that! In 1956, I was 5 years old, my uncle Manta Carmello, who had the Colbert pizzeria in Toulon, brought my family over from Sicily. My father was a farmer, in the Léry district of La Seyne. And I met my wife, Josy, when her parents, who were from the same Sicilian village as me, Serradifalco (178km from Taormina, a very beautiful tourist town), took over a pizzeria that I ran for a year on rue Picot in Toulon, after Sanary. I taught the parents the trade and married their daughter. Today, my youngest son, William, and his son Many, 22, work with us. Ready to take over.

Thinking about retirement?

Retirement? When I'm old!