The 78 Best Places to Drink in Italy

A former textile warehouse in the semi-central city holds a Michelin-starred cocktail bar and restaurant that Europe's 50 Best Bars ranks seventh in the world. The ground floor runs as a bistrot and cocktail bar, while twelve seats upstairs, half of them at the kitchen counter, host an experimental tasting menu that travels from Romagna to Spain without quite settling anywhere. The chef stops by every table, which at twelve covers is less a gesture than a genuine conversation.

The courtyard of a Renaissance palazzo serves as the lounge bar, where a long counter anchors an ambitious cocktail program alongside tapas-style bites. Venture deeper and there are proper dining rooms, the chef's cooking shaped by stints in Australia, Japan, and France. The medieval cellars below host an intimate reservation-only experience pairing avant-garde food with mixology for four guests. Ranked in The World's 50 Best Bars, this is Florence doing something genuinely hard to categorize.

Art-nouveau wallpaper, candlelight, and a room that feels borrowed from another century set the mood at this cocktail bar tucked into a quiet Naples street. The drinks move between classic recipes and the team's own inventions, all handled with the kind of care that earns a spot on Europe's 50 Best Bars. Wednesdays bring live jazz, which suits the speakeasy atmosphere so naturally it almost seems suspicious.

The elevator banks inside Renzo Piano's Intesa Sanpaolo tower deliver you, at some speed, to a Michelin-starred restaurant 150 metres above Turin. Step onto the panoramic terrace first, before the room pulls you in. Contemporary Piedmontese tasting menus run from regional to pan-Italian to a nod toward the Piccolo Lago mothership. At lunch the whole operation shifts into a more relaxed bistro gear, which is its own reason to come up here.

The grease pits are long gone, but Freni e Frizioni still has the bones of the auto workshop it used to be, reclaimed furniture and all. It's an aperitivo bar in Trastevere that pulls a crowd big enough to colonize the piazza outside most evenings. The cocktail list roams restlessly, taking inspiration from neighborhoods around the world. It holds a spot on Europe's 50 Best Bars, which the early-evening spillover crowd seems blissfully unaware of.

The staff wears Gucci, which tells you everything about the room before you've ordered a drink. This all-day cocktail bar sits inside the fashion house's Florence creative space on Piazza della Signoria, and the drinks, both spiked and not, lean visual and inventive. It holds a spot on Europe's 50 Best Bars. Come for a Martini in a room that takes its own aesthetic very, very seriously.

The Campari family opened this cocktail bar under the glass vaults of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele back when standing at a counter with a drink in hand was a novelty worth naming, and the house bitters were the whole point. It holds a spot on Europe's 50 Best Bars, and the negronis arrive in surroundings that make every other bar feel like it needs to try harder. Dress accordingly.

A windowless room on Via del Moro in Trastevere, done up in dark wood and overhead luggage racks like a very stationary Orient Express car. Jerry Thomas is a classic cocktail bar with 90-minute reservations and bartenders dressed for a century ago, which suits the bottled classics and Champagne on offer. Outside, Trastevere does its rowdy thing; inside, you'd never know.

Hammocks, tribal masks, and enough bottles to stock a small nation line the walls of this legendary Milan cocktail bar on Viale Piave. Dario Comino has been quietly pioneering every technique in the cocktail world, from clarification to fermentation, since before most bars knew those words. Drinks here borrow from distant cultures while playing with texture in ways that tend to surprise even regulars who think they know the menu.

A classic American bar format in a Milan neighborhood that doesn't get many tourists, Rita has been doing fresh, seasonal cocktails since before that phrase appeared on every drinks menu in the world. The team makes their own syrups and ingredients in-house, which was a minor act of rebellion when they started and now just reads as good practice. Europe's 50 Best Bars has it at number 49. The crowd is local, confident, and rarely consults the menu.

Colorful Mexican-tile bar top, embroidered stools, and a wall of agave spirits that would embarrass most dedicated mezcalerias: La Punta is a tequila and mezcal bar tucked into Trastevere, run by the team behind Jerry Thomas Speakeasy. They traveled to Oaxaca to build the menu, and it shows. Downstairs, a smaller den packs in even more bottles and Mexican paraphernalia. Order slowly; the list rewards it.

A handful of bar stools at a grey marble counter, and the rest of the room is tightly packed tables that belong to diners at mealtimes. Harry's is a cocktail bar that trades heavily on its history, and it earned every bit of it: this is where the Bellini was invented, and Hemingway was a regular. It's small, plain, and slightly intimidating to walk into, which somehow makes ordering one feel like an occasion.

The Negroni Sbagliato was born here when the owner grabbed sparkling wine instead of gin and decided to serve it anyway. Bar Basso is an old-school neighborhood cocktail bar in Milan that has barely changed since the late fifties, and the happy accident has been the house drink ever since. Order yours in one of the enormous chalice glasses the original owner designed, a shape you'll start spotting around the city once you know to look.

A glass roof now covers what was once an open courtyard of a Renaissance-era convent, and the Four Seasons Firenze built its signature cocktail bar around that fact. Pale light, deep sofas, and verdant garden views make it feel less like a hotel bar and less like a museum than you might expect. In the evenings a pianist plays, the bar team reinterprets classics with some invention, and the crowd dresses accordingly.

Emerald walls, a marble bar top, and a grand piano set the scene at this cocktail bar near Milan's Centrale station. The conceit is a fictional bartender named Nik, sailing the world across the decades and mixing drinks inspired by the people he meets along the way. It sounds like a lot, but the room pulls it off with enough charm that you stop questioning the lore and start ordering. A Discovery selection from The 50.

The menu at this rum bar in Marina di Ravenna's international port runs to 180 pages, part cocktail list, part coffee-table book on Haiti's distilleries. More than 2,200 bottles line the walls, and the 24 drinks range from Caribbean classics to inventive originals. It holds a Pinnacle Guide pin. Pack patience: a bar this devoted to sugarcane spirits is not a place for a quick one.

The toilet is famously larger than the bar, which seats four people at a counter and leaves no room for ambiguity about what kind of night you're having. Backdoor 43 is a reservation-only cocktail bar tucked behind another bar on the Navigli, and the bartender on duty is working exclusively for you. Guests pick the music, the pace, and apparently the vibe. Very small, very Milan.

Two rooftop pools and a cocktail bar on the fourth floor of a building in Milan's Porta Garibaldi district set the scene here: the kind of place that decided glamour and a proper dinner weren't mutually exclusive. Brass, marble, and vintage wood fill the interior while the terraces open onto skyscraper views. The kitchen keeps the Italian menu light and seasonal, and the cocktails have become a standard reference point for the city.

The design riffs on the 1950s golden age of Italian bar culture, and Cinquanta leans into it without tipping into kitsch. It's a cocktail bar in Pagani where an espresso at the counter is as welcome as a negroni with friends, and the staff seem to mean it. The specialty drinks menu rotates monthly, dusting off forgotten classics alongside more idiosyncratic combinations. Difford's Guide and The 50 Discovery have both taken notice.

The cocktail bar that decided pizza was the obvious food pairing, back when that was a radical idea in Milan. Dry is a lively, sociable spot on Via Solferino where the drinks are serious and the tables are meant to be shared, sometimes with strangers who are perfectly happy to share them. The room runs warm and international, the kind of place where arriving alone rarely stays that way for long.

Historic photographs of the original café guided the renovation, so the room feels like a Florentine institution that quietly relocated across the street and pretended nothing happened. Giacosa 1815 opens as a coffee-and-pastry spot, then pivots to aperitivo as the evening arrives. The Negroni is practically mandatory, given the history, but the cocktail list keeps going for those who feel like exploring past the obvious.

Tucked under the Procuratie Nuove arcades on Piazza San Marco, Caffè Florian has been around forever, and the gilded, frescoed rooms know it. It's a coffee and drinks bar where tourists come for the theater of the thing and locals duck in for a quick espresso at the counter, which costs considerably less than sitting down in the ornate dining rooms with the orchestra outside. Both options exist; just know which one you're paying for.

Bartenders in white tuxedos hand drinks to bellboys who carry them across one of the more theatrical lobby lounges in Venice, which is saying something. The Dandolo is a hotel bar in the Gothic palazzo next to the Doge's Palace, and the setting does most of the heavy lifting. Classic cocktails are reliably solid; the rest of the menu is less memorable. Come for the room, not the drinks list.

The black-and-white geometric mosaic walls do something clever with the glassware and smoked ceiling mirrors: the light never quite settles. This is the bar inside the Mandarin Oriental Milan, and it runs from espresso at eight in the morning all the way to a proper late night, organizing itself around aperitivo and the slower hours that follow. The outdoor sofas stay calm well into the evening before the room finds its louder gear.

Perched above a Replay store in Milan's gleaming Piazza Gae Aulenti, the Octavius Bar arrives as a nautical surprise, with boat-like design details in a neighbourhood that reads more glass tower than harbour. The cocktail bar draws the after-work crowd that lives in this part of the city, the kind of people who take their aperitivo seriously. Gae Aulenti is Milan's most self-consciously international square, which makes the whole thing feel pleasingly theatrical.

The name comes from the horticultural term for a cutting, a piece of a plant relocated to take root somewhere new, which tells you something about the ambitions here. Talea is an experimental cocktail bar tucked into a slightly unexpected corner of the Navigli area, with a room that feels deliberately intimate. The drinks lean on kitchen technique as much as bar technique, so what arrives in the glass tends to surprise before it satisfies.

The terrace hangs right over the Grand Canal, which is either romantic or deeply unfair depending on your budget. This hotel bar inside the Gritti Palace does the Grand Venetian thing without apology: etched mirrors, red marble floors, white-tie bartenders working through a long menu of classics. The crowd leans tourist, but the setting is so extravagant that nobody seems to mind being exactly where a postcard told them to be.

The terrace hangs right over the Grand Canal, which is the whole argument for sitting here. This hotel bar at the Bauer does its job quietly, with black leather club chairs and scarlet walls they call the Red Room, though the interior is otherwise pretty modest by Venetian hotel-bar standards. Order something cold and watch the boats go by, which is exactly what everyone around you is doing.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves of wine and spirits line the walls of this canalside enoteca near Ponte San Trovaso, which works simultaneously as a wine shop, coffee stop, and cicchetti bar. The family runs the counter together, father and sons pouring by the glass while the food comes from behind a glass display case. A dozen or so wines open at a time, mostly from the Veneto, and bottles leave tucked under tourist arms at a reassuring clip.

A small cocktail bar with an industrial-meets-contemporary fit-out on a residential stretch between Porta Venezia and Piazzale Loreto, where boutique shops outnumber tourists. The team comes out of five-star luxury hotels, and it shows in the pacing and the polish, though the room itself is relaxed enough that nobody feels underdressed. Milanese regulars mix with the kind of international crowd that follows a good bartender from job to job.

Wine labels plaster the ceiling at this old-school Venetian wine bar tucked into a narrow alley near the Rialto, and the cellar below holds over a thousand bottles at prices that feel slightly illegal for Venice. Rough wooden benches, bare planks on the walls, and a glass counter piled with cicheti complete the picture. Locals have been doing exactly this, a glass and a small bite, here for generations.

A 15-meter bar counter lined with bamboo shelves stacked floor-to-ceiling with rum pretty much tells you everything. Rita's Tiki Room is a cocktail bar on Milan's canalside strip, serving Tiki classics and house originals alongside Polynesian snacks with a Cantonese edge. The same team behind Rita around the corner runs this one, and the vibe is full commitment: proper accoutrements, no ironic winking at the theme.

The sign is easy to miss, which seems to be part of the point. This cocktail bar in Porta Romana pulls you into a low-lit room of velvet sofas, extravagant mirrors, and sparkling lights that make it feel like the '80s never quite ended. The kind of place where you stop checking your phone without deciding to. A neighborhood worth wandering for its trattorias anyway, so the detour is painless.

A corner bacaro a short walk from San Marco, with shutters thrown open and barely a meter of corridor to stand in. The reason to know it is the hours: open until 1am most nights and 2am on Saturdays, long after Venice has gone to bed. Drinkers overflow onto the campo, voices carrying loudly enough to navigate by, which the neighbors have noted and the police occasionally confirm.

Surfboards and antique furniture share wall space at this cocktail bar on the far edge of Milan, and somehow the combination works. The room feels less like a city bar and more like a countryside detour, all mismatched art and skating decks, with a plant enthusiast behind the counter shaking what Italians have always called "misture." Five kilometers from the center, which is exactly far enough to feel like you've escaped something.