Outside Naples, in the town of Caiazzo, a wood stove burns on the first floor of what Franco Pepe calls his laboratory. The stone house, which sits astride a hillside alley, is home to his latest restaurant, Pepe in Grani, which opened last month. Mr. Pepe is busy testing different flour combinations in a search for the perfect dough for the pizzas his new establishment and pizza maker training facility will serve.

"I research the products I use, and that's important," Mr. Pepe says. "But the most important element remains the impasto, the dough. With a mixture of inferior grains, you will never achieve the same results."

Kneading the perfect dough alle12/istockphoto

His kitchen reveals a blend of high-cuisine ambitions and pizza's peasant past. The wood-burning brick oven is newly crafted by Stefano Ferrara, one of the world's top artisanal manufacturers. A laser-guided thermometer helps Mr. Pepe track the temperature within the bricks. Wooden crates cradle flawlessly formed, hand-kneaded balls of dough—"little yeast, lots of time," Mr. Pepe says, echoing a key pizzaiuolo dictum. Clay pots house a local spicy pecorino, while the fragrance of hand-selected oregano spills forth from open glass containers. The stufa, a conical metal container used in the old days to keep pies warm while they were delivered door to door, draws the eye.

"The stufa is a reminder that making pizza should take you back out to people," he explains. "This type of product was made to meet the hunger of regular people. We are artisans."

Mr. Pepe isn't alone in his passion. From Naples's historic center to its surrounding region, Italian pizza makers are building on tradition to give this city's greatest culinary staple a push forward.

Enzo Coccia at Pizzeria La Notizi Pizzeria La Notizia

Local critics and pizza makers themselves agree that pizza is better in the city and region now than it has been in years, thanks to artisans like Mr. Pepe driving a search for quality and authenticity that had escaped the sector in the mid-1980s, when its popularity exploded.

Pizzerias excel by following a few strict and unalterable guidelines. "A wood-burning oven, production by hand, proper treatment of yeast," is how Massimo Di Porzio, vice president of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana describes it. "These are the three secrets."

The best way to tune your palate to the formula is to start your journey by visiting one of the pizzerie storiche in Naples's downtown and ordering a margherita. "These places are always holes in the wall," says Dino Buonaiuto, a local resident.

Blending history with recognized quality, a number of these places, such as the Materdei neighborhood's Starita, which Sophia Loren made famous in the 1954 film "L'oro di Napoli," or Da Attilio in the heart of the Pignasecca, help define the neighborhood around them.

Da Michele's, a short distance from the central train station in downtown Naples, serves only two pizzas—margherita and marinara. A set of plaques running from floor to ceiling and written in acerbic Neapolitan dialect explain why. All the explanation you really need, though, is in the first bite. The dough is light, but firm and a bit sweet. Dark spots dot the crust, but it never crosses the line to biscottato, a crunchiness traditionalists despise. Nothing more than a few euros is necessary to understand what sits at the root of the city's love affair with pizza. Every innovation, every step forward, relies on mastery of the most basic culinary skill: baking bread.

Antica Osteria Pizzeria Pepe's margherita pizza with buffalo mozzarella. Dissapore

As pizza consultant Enzo Coccia puts it: "We are bakers above all. To know how to make pizza, you have to know how to make bread."

Mr. Coccia, who opened Pizzaria La Notizia in 1994 in Naples's uptown Vomero neighborhood, expanded in 2010 to open a more upscale, experimental branch of the restaurant. The newer restaurant serves up an array of "creative pizzas" conceived and tested in all-staff meetings and cooked using ingredients found in the surrounding countryside.

This approach stands out in a city that has come to believe that margherita and marinara are the only true pizzas, a notion Mr. Coccia passionately and scientifically opposes with creations in which succulent zucchini flowers meld with a nut oil and basil in a pesto-like burst of fresh flavor or, in another, sun-dried tomatoes and capers meet anchovies of an almost delicate flavor to create the Santa Lucia, which hearkens back to an old pizza recipe popular with the port city's sailors.

"When our staff gathers, everyone comes up with ideas," he says. "We try them out, see if it's OK. It's a group job."

Ask for a degustazione and Mr. Coccia's staff will make recommendations for each round of pizzas to try. The experience at Pizzaria La Notizia, paired with a bottle of Terre del Principe wine, will far outrank the €60 to €100 you will spend on dinner for two. Mr. Coccia and staff's creations are no flights of whimsy. As in any art, innovation must be grounded on a solid foundation, he explains. "If you don't know how to attain the right temperature to bake the dough, if you don't know how a tomato is grown, how can you talk about innovation?" he says.

If you don't know how to attain the right temperature to bake the dough, don't know how a tomato is grown, how can you talk about innovation?

Sometimes innovation is simply a change in coordinates. Naples residents have long held that the only true pizza comes out of the brick ovens strictly within the city limits—the closer to the center, the better. But to understand where pizza is going, you should eventually head to the Neapolitan hinterlands.

Reserve a bed-and-breakfast in Sant'Agata de' Goti, a postcard-perfect medieval burg about 45 kilometers away that is built atop a tuff mountain far off the tourist charts. From there, a short drive to Caiazzo takes you to the restaurant of the Pepe family, Antica Osteria Pizzeria Pepe, which has won over aficionados from throughout the region. The Pepe family serves up as good a margherita as can be found anywhere in the Spanish Quarter: The dough is tender and the crust rises thumb high. Steam dances off a thick but light mix of San Marzano tomatoes and fior di latte mozzarella, an impossibly green burst of basil crowning the creamy ensemble.

Mr. Pepe decided to diversify from the family tradition: In mid-October he christened his second location, Pepe in Grani, in an expertly renovated 18th-century building that will house a library, rooms for people following his courses, and several separate dining spaces. The students are already pizza makers themselves, but want to deepen their craft.

Back in Mr. Pepe's kitchen, the spicy pecorino from the clay pots is being set atop pepper, basil and strutto, a spread made from pork fat, which come together as his rendition of mastunicola, an ancient dish that predates the arrival of the tomato; its consumption has been traced back as far as the 16th century. Mr. Pepe's version of the dish will come to many diners as a completely new blend of scents and flavors. To give it a modern spin, he tops the ensemble with white fig preserves from the Cilento area. "This is about bringing pizza among people in a way that recalls the smells of long ago," he says.

As for the stufa in the corner: "I'll use it often, both for people who are waiting here and to deliver it to people's houses."