Give more than you get.

Halfway up to the cupola of the Duomo, out of breath, Richard Williams stopped to rest. He was 51 years old, a tenured professor at East Carolina University, and he'd come back to Florence for the second time. The first time, he had signed up for a two-week pizza-making course at the Bivero Pizza Academy and stayed for thirty-nine days — twelve hours a day in the restaurant, eating what he made, learning what he didn't know. This time, he had come back just to be there.

On the stairway wall, someone had written in Sharpie:

Give more than you get and be blessed.

He took it as a sign.

Back in Greenville that fall, the professor felt wooden. Tenure, a pension, twenty-five years of students he loved teaching — he had every reason to stay. In five or ten years, he figured, he'd be too tired to try anything else. He couldn't stop thinking about pizza.

There were harder days. One morning on the way to work, he had to pull over in a bank parking lot, overcome. He wrote emails comparing himself to Cortez burning his boats, to Yeager breaking the sound barrier — men who had made the leap and survived the shaking apart that followed.

Then he resigned.

He needed a restaurant guy. He called John Jefferson, a friend from his years at the Ale House — someone who had worked his way up from server to operations, someone who opened restaurants for a living. Richard wasn't sure John would take the chance. John did.

Luna's dough ferments for five days.

The flour comes from Italy. On the first order, they had to buy an entire shipping container of it to prove they were serious buyers. They start the process with Biga — a sourdough-like starter Italians have been making since before any of us were born. The Pomodoro recipe came back with Richard from Bivero. The oven runs at eight hundred degrees. A pie cooks in ninety seconds.

In Italy, Richard likes to point out, pizza isn't fast food. It's dinner. There are tablecloths. There are waiters. People come in, sit down, dress for it.

He wanted to build a room where Americans could do the same.

The Clayton restaurant lives in a downtown building with good bones — not too big. Richard wanted intimate. The menu runs from the Margherita as Naples makes it, to meatballs from the family recipe, to a tiramisu that lives up to the word. The dining room fills at dusk and doesn't thin out until the laughter fades.

The line from the Duomo is on the menu now. Hand-lettered, tucked beside the knife and fork. Most people walk past it. The ones who notice, notice.

Give more than you get and be blessed.