In an article published in the Journal of Asian Studies in 1970 by Professor Leopold Fisher - known by his monastic name of Agehananda Bharati - the "pizza effect" was theorised: it is a process by which an element from one culture is transported to another culture, where it undergoes a transformation. Once transformed, it returns to its original context, taking the place of the initial element. To describe this cultural phenomenon, Professor Bharati used pizza: this is because pizza in the 19th century was not the symbol of good food and well-being, but the symbol of desperate social and economic conditions such as those in the city of Naples. In fact, the common characteristics of this focaccia, already widespread in the Mediterranean context (e.g. the Greek pita), were the very poor quality and poverty of its ingredients. It was then the Neapolitans themselves who despised this product: the writer Matilde Serao, in one of her most important novels, Il ventre di Napoli (1884), took pizza and made it the symbol of the decay afflicting the city in the aftermath of yet another cholera epidemic; the journalist Gaetano Valeriani encapsulated his thoughts in the phrase: "Pizzas are ancient among us, but better never to have been born!" Pizza underwent a profound change at the beginning of the 20th century with the great emigration from Southern Italy, during which many Italians arrived en masse in the United States of America, particularly in New York City: according to some statistics, more than 800,000 Italians were living in the Big Apple at the dawn of the First World War. The increased affordability of the American population and greater availability of ingredients made pizza the dish it is today: from street food to restaurant fare. Pizzerias also became a meeting place for Italian immigrants, who could now afford dishes enriched with new ingredients, unlike the poor, monotonous dishes they were forced to eat in Italy. The legends surrounding pizza - such as the one about Queen Margherita of Savoy - have recently come back into vogue for the city's tourist revival; as Daniele Soffiati and Alberto Grandi write: "History sells itself and is a great promotional factor. It becomes worrying when it is the historians who sell themselves..."