Excerpt: An authentic pizza in three minutes? The reaction from Italy's pizzaioli today was as scorching as the temperature of the wood-fired ovens in which they make their venerated dish.

Claudio Torghele, who has invented the "Let's Pizza" machine, claims that it can make a pizza by beating flour and water into a dough, stretching the dough into the classic round shape and then adding tomato sauce and toppings to choice - cheese and tomato, vegetables, ham or bacon - before baking it in an infrared oven and finally sliding the finished product into the hands of the customer, all for a modest €3.50 (£3.25). That's half the price of eating one in the average Italian pizzeria.

Mr Torghele, 56, from Rovereto, near Trento in mountainous northern Italy, says that the machine has windows so that customers can follow the three-minute progress of their pizza by peering in. He came up with the idea while working in California a decade ago. "At food courts I saw...