Is it pizza?
Is sardenaira a pizza, a focaccia, or a pissaladière?
How should Liguria's tomato-and-anchovy tray bread be classified?
Sanremo's sardenaira sits between three traditions at once — Ligurian focaccia, Neapolitan-descended pizza, and the Provençal pissaladière just across the border — and local usage does not agree with any single external classification.
PizzaHQ presents both sides and takes no side. Whether a topped flatbread tradition belongs in the pizza category at all — a question about classification, not quality.
The documented positions
Sanremo local usage
Sardenaira is its own named dish, defined by its anchovy or sardine, olive, caper and garlic topping on a Ligurian tray dough — neither a pizza nor a plain focaccia.
Reasoning: The dish carries several distinct local names across a small stretch of coast (sardenaira, pizza all'Andrea, machetusa), which is characteristic of a tradition defined locally rather than by an external category.
Generally accepted- Sardenaira — Wikipedia
Comparative classification with pissaladière
It is essentially the Italian side of a cross-border Ligurian-Provençal tradition of anchovy-and-onion tray breads, of which pissaladière is the French side.
Reasoning: The topping vocabulary, the tray format and the geography are continuous across the border; the national boundary is a poor guide to the culinary one.
Generally accepted- The Oxford Companion to Food — Oxford University Press
Why it is contested
The Ligurian coast is a genuine culinary borderland. Any classification that assigns the dish cleanly to one national tradition loses information about how it actually developed.
Related
Evidence
Generally accepted- Sardenaira — Wikipedia