I can't speak to pizza, but I have an espresso story to tell.
One of my favorite things about going to Italy is the quality of the coffee. I really like extreme dark roast (your typical American diner coffee doesn't even count as coffee in my book). In Italy you can go into pretty much any coffee shop and come away with a top-quality espresso. (Don't even get me started on Starbucks.) It's a taste I inherited from my parents, who have European roots.
Now, my parents are seriously old-school. They still live in the house I grew up in, a house they bought new in 1975 and pretty much never updated. It still has the original flower-pattern wall paper. Walking into their house today feels like stepping into a time machine that transports you to an episode of the Brady Bunch. And in their kitchen is a 40-year-old Mr. Coffee which my father loves to futz with. On a good day he can coax it into producing an acceptable cup of joe, but that's about it. So for their 50th anniversary I decided I was going to buy them a proper espresso machine.
Now, I know next to nothing about espresso except that I love to drink it, so I started doing some homework and very soon got lost in a morass of coffee geekdom. The range of options available in the espresso machine market is truly mind-boggling, as are the prices. I didn't mind dropping some serious coin (this was their 50th anniversary after all) but I wanted to make sure I was actually getting something for my money. So I decided to do some experiments.
At the time I worked in a co-working office that had a high-end espresso machine (retail price $5000) and several Italians so I asked one of them to show me how to make a proper espresso. I wanted to use the espresso that came out of the office machine as a baseline and compare it to what I could make on a less expensive machine to see if the machine actually made a difference. "The first thing you have to do," he told me, "is to get the right beans. You have to go to this little specialty shop that's a half-hour drive away and get this particular brand of beans..." which, of course, cost $50 a pound or something absurd like that. But I love my parents, so I dutifully complied.
Proper beanage having been procured, we spent several hours brewing espresso with just about every possible variation on the theme you could imagine. Different grinds (we had a high-end burr grinder in the office too), different packings, different machine settings. Not once did we manage to produce a cup that any of us considered even remotely drinkable. It was all acidic and awful, probably because the machine had never been cleaned since it was installed god-only-knows how many years before.
I ended up getting them a Keurig. I got one for myself too. It makes a decent cup of coffee, but nothing compared to what you find in Italy. It is still a mystery to me how the Italians manage to produce such consistently good coffee, but only in Italy. When they come to the U.S. they seem to lose the touch. Maybe there's something in the water.