Massimo Mannino, co-owner of Marabella Pizza and Grill in Washington, recently took his culinary talents to Parma, Italy, to join the United States Pizza Team.

While there, he competed alongside some of the best chefs around the globe in the World Pizza Championship.

“It’s people from all over the world, so it is very competitive,” Mannino said.

The event, sometimes called the “Olympics of Pizza,” was held in May and featured 10 different categories of competition, according to a press release.

Amidst a flurry of pizza twirling, dough stretching and baking, Mannino competed in the pan pizza category, baking a pie that placed 40^th out of 800 entries, according to the release.

The pizza was made of ingredients bought fresh from Parma, Italy, according to Mannino. He used crema di Parmigiano, cheese arugula, grilled zucchini, stracchino cheese and Italian cured meat called lardo di Colonnata.

“The pressure is definitely there,” Mannino said of the championship. He explained that baking in such a high-pressure environment is difficult because there is no margin for error.

“You have to adjust. It’s not easy. There’s a lot of pressure. It’s not the same at home, where if you make a mistake, you can just start over and make a new pizza,” he said.

Mannino said he was invited to join the U.S. Pizza Team in 2016 after successful performances at other events, including a second-place finish in last year’s International Pizza Challenge in Las Vegas.

The team is made up of 17 master pizza chefs, or pizzaioli, from around the country. It consists of acrobats, who compete in events like dough stretching and freestyle acrobatics, and culinary members like Mannino whose pizzas are judged on varying criteria, according to the team’s website.

“I started doing competitions four years ago,” Mannino said. “I try to represent what I come from, and I love to compete.”

He said his success comes from constant training.

“I’m always training. I try to come up with fresh ingredients and ideas,” he said. “I train by making the pizza that I want to bake and trying it out on my employees.”

Patrons of Marabella and Mannino’s other restaurants — Nino’s in Greenville and Marabella Old World Pizza in Greenville and Farmville — will soon be able to try this pizza from the world competition. Mannino said he plans to sell it as soon as the lardo di Colonnata is shipped in from Italy.

Mannino said he enjoyed the world competition because it helped to make him a better chef, and he made friends with the other chefs on the team.

“It was a learning process,” he said. “It’s about always learning to make yourself better by coming up with new dishes, new pasta, new pizza.”

Mannino plans to continue making pizza competitively, as well as try his hand in pasta making. This year, he will travel to Ohio and New York to participate in pasta and pizza competitions.

He uses the competitions as a learning experience to improve the food at his restaurants, Mannino said.

“People have been very good to me, so I want to go there and see what I can make of it,” he said.