The Best Italian Food in Italy

Exposed brick walls and Piedmontese furnishings set the scene at this pizzeria tucked between two of Asti's central piazzas. The Neapolitan-style dough gets a northern Italian edit, with seasonal pies built on high-quality local toppings and a cornicione that's airy enough to make you reconsider leaving the crust. Dry-aged meat shares the menu with oven-baked starters, and the wine list pulls from Langhe and Monferrato, as it should.

A Neapolitan-style pizza shop in Siderno where the dough is soft, the cornicione properly charred, and the owner is the kind of person who ends his shift eating with his family in the dining room, which tells you everything. The menu leans into Calabrian touches, including a spicy Locride sauce that earns its place. Gluten-free options are taken seriously here, not treated as an afterthought.

Contemporary Neapolitan pizza in the deep Salento, where the crust is the whole argument: aromatic, soft in the middle, and actually crisp at the base. The team leans hard on local and DOP ingredients, and they've put the same care into a dessert menu that holds its own. The dining room mixes exposed vaults and terracotta floors with modern touches, a combination still finding its footing, but the pizza makes you stop noticing fairly quickly.

A pizzeria set inside an old city wall in Empoli, where someone thought to pair stone arches with sleek modern decor and somehow it works. The menu runs from well-executed Neapolitan classics to bolder, less predictable combinations, with the same attention given to the traditional appetizers. The staff know the menu well enough to walk you through it without making you feel like you need to.

You'll spot the fridge of enormous Florentine steaks before you spot your table, which is Dal Toscano's way of setting expectations. It's a Tuscan trattoria near the Vatican, and the pasta turns out to be a serious sideline: silky fettuccine in a pale ragù, chewy pici with garlic the size of a fist. A kilo of bistecca and a carafe of Chianti are what the room is clearly built around.

This is a white-tablecloth Roman trattoria where the waiters are dressed better than most of the diners, a tradition that appears to be non-negotiable. The ham gets sliced off the bone to order and the mozzarella arrives daily from Campania. Order the gricia, or tortellini in brodo once it turns cold. It sits across from the Opera House, so locals fill it with business dinners, date nights, and family tables the size of a small orchestra.

Pecorino is a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant that feels like Sunday lunch at a cousin's house, complete with framed photos of relatives nobody can identify. The waiters wear crisp white shirts and have clearly been on the floor since adolescence, which explains the sarcasm and the firm opinions about what you're ordering. Portions are generous and nobody rushes you through the carbonara, so plan on staying a while.

Rocco is a Roman trattoria with starched tablecloths and polished terrazzo floors, though nobody's stiff about any of it. The menu lives on a chalkboard in elegant cursive and gets rewritten daily, and the cacio e pepe shows up with spaghetti cooked exactly as long as it should be. There's one dinner seating, and the room is the kind where a former president or a film director might be at the next table, eating like a regular.

Ragu-stuffed arancini the size of a small fist are the opening argument at this Sicilian street food spot in the heart of Florence. The menu runs through slabs of Sicilian pizza, granita, cannoli, and a Bronte pistachio gelato that Florentines quietly argue about. The chef behind it has since built out a small empire along the river and beyond, but this is where the obsession is most concentrated.

A basement wine cellar a stone's throw from the Ponte Vecchio, Buca Dell'Orafo is one of the last old-school trattorias holding down the historic center. The menu reads like a Florentine time capsule: ribollita, panzanella, bistecca, braised veal in tomato sauce. Service can be uneven, but the room has the kind of unhurried, candlelit gravity that makes you order another glass and stop worrying about it.

You have to ring a doorbell to get in, which sets the tone nicely for this old-school Roman trattoria near Campo dei Fiori. The team behind Cesare al Casaletto took over after the beloved predecessor closed, keeping the tiled floors, midcentury furniture, and a tight menu that still features the previous owner's pan-fried meatballs. It's the kind of place that resists the urge to reinvent itself, which is exactly the point.

A Florentine trattoria that styles itself a "culinary club," with Tuscan cooking as the anchor and regional specialties from across Italy filling out the menu. The chef chases obscure ingredients and small producers, including one aging cheese in Etruscan-era caves, which is exactly the kind of detail that makes nonna's kitchen feel like an adventure. The beef croquettes and the potato-filled tortelli are the things people come back for.

Prosciutto legs hang from the ceiling, straw-wrapped chianti bottles line the shelves, and waiters holler across the room like they're doing you a personal favor. La Vecchia Bettola is an old-school Florentine trattoria where the name means exactly what it says: old tavern. The Tuscan repertoire runs deep, and locals fill the place for the bistecca alla fiorentina and fried artichokes. Prices stay honest, the room stays loud, and nobody pretends otherwise.

The cafe inside Milan's Villa Reale serves Sicilian food under a fin-de-siecle portico that looks out over the public gardens, which is a better lunch situation than most people manage on a workday. Dishes arrive in Sicilian ceramic bowls, the menu leans toward updated island classics, and the cannoli are filled to order on site. It's the kind of museum cafe that makes you forget the art was the original plan.

A porthole-sized window into the kitchen is your first clue that Mazzo takes cooking seriously while keeping things loose. This San Lorenzo trattoria-leaning restaurant built its reputation on Roman nostalgia done with a sharp eye, leaning into offal and old-school pasta forms without winking too hard. The fried tripe with pecorino and tomato is the kind of dish that makes you wonder why anyone ever tried to modernize Roman food in the first place.

Paper plates arrive loaded with beef cartilage and horse meat stew at this Porta Venezia osteria, where cucina povera is the whole point. Diego Rossi, the chef behind Trippa, runs a room built around offal, crostini, and natural wine, served from aperitivo hour until midnight. On weekends, the crowd from Via Melzo spills onto the pavement, which tells you something about how the neighborhood feels about the place.

A family-run osteria near Centrale station where the cassoeula, that old Lombard pork-and-cabbage stew, arrives the same way it did for whoever ran this place before them. Workers fill the tables midweek; families crowd in on weekends for risotto Milanese and anchovies in salsa verde. Save room for the pistachio and hot pepper gelato, which sounds like a dare and isn't. On the way out, peer into the Liberty-style hall next door.

A handwritten menu posted outside lists what they don't serve: no pizza, no ice, no cappuccino, no spritz. Inside this tiny osteria a short walk from the Uffizi, the kitchen cooks old Tuscan with no detours, from pappardelle in duck ragu to peposo, a peppery beef stew that dates back to the Renaissance. The room fits a handful of tables, and the regulars treat it like a canteen they'd rather you didn't know about.

A tiny panino stall on the curb outside the Sant'Ambrogio market, run by a man who will tell you, without hesitation, that he makes the best sandwich in the world. The chalkboard menu skips the usual cold cuts in favor of things like stewed donkey with pear and truffle, or wild boar sausage with broccoli rabe. Order, watch it get assembled fast, and expect a small glass of wine to be pressed on you before you leave.

Sacks of stone-milled flour from Le Marche, Campania, and Sicily crowd the entrance, which tells you something about how seriously this pizza al taglio shop takes its raw materials. Pizza Nader sits in the southern Roma 70 neighborhood, far from the tourist circuit, turning out deeply flavored slices and a dozen varieties of naturally leavened bread. The supplì alone can stop a conversation mid-sentence.

The wine list at this old-school Florentine trattoria skews heavily Tuscan, with enough bottles from the rest of Italy and beyond to keep things interesting. The kitchen takes homestyle Tuscan classics and nudges them toward something a little more considered, portions run generous, and the desserts are not an afterthought. Tucked into the Oltrarno neighborhood, it draws the kind of locals who treat a long Tuesday dinner as a reasonable life choice.

A trattoria wedged into a medieval tower on Tiber Island, which is already a strong opening move. Sora Lella has been turning out cucina romana since forever, and the third generation has quietly sharpened things back up after a long, comfortable coasting phase. The wine list skips the obvious and leans into Lazio's overlooked labels. Wood-paneled rooms, cacio e pepe somewhere on the menu, and the kind of crowd that didn't need a reservation app to find this place.

The naturally leavened bread arrives before you've decided anything, which tells you something about how this restaurant thinks. In a low-lit Garbatella room with Nordic bones and Roman soul, the kitchen brings Abruzzo's mountain larder into conversation with the capital, via a menu that shifts constantly but keeps landing somewhere comforting. Chickpea soup with chestnuts and dried figs, lamb with puntarelle, the kind of wine list that stays stubbornly central Italian.

Sit on the sixth floor of Fondazione Prada's tower building and you have Lucio Fontana on the walls, a triangular terrace for sunset drinks, and bread arriving from the storied Marchesi pasticceria. This is an upscale restaurant serving modern Milanese food and seafood with a Tuscan coastal lean. The crowd dresses accordingly, and the art-world adjacency keeps things from feeling stuffy, which is its own small miracle for a place this polished.

Inside the Sant'Ambrogio market, this old-school family trattoria runs on seasonal plates, dirt-cheap prices, and staff who holler across the room like nobody's watching. Florence is busy reinventing itself as a serious dining destination, but Trattoria da Rocco has not gotten the memo, and that is entirely the point. Go before one o'clock or squeeze into a small booth with the crowd and order whatever is on that day.

Communal tables, no reservations, and a menu that shrinks as the morning goes on: Trattoria Mario is an old-school Florentine lunch spot near Mercato Centrale that fills fast with locals and tourists making peace with each other over Tuscan bean soup and bistecca alla fiorentina. The vegetables are, by tradition, cooked into submission, but nobody comes here for that. Come early, order the pasta with ragu, and accept that the best things will be gone by noon.

The décor stopped updating sometime in the 1970s and has sensibly stayed put ever since. This is an old-school neighborhood trattoria in the Oltrarno, the kind locals call a blast from the past without meaning it as a criticism. The kitchen turns out honest Tuscan fare: pici, roast pork, and a spaghetti alla carrettiera built on a dense, chile-spiked red sauce with anchovies and breadcrumbs. It sits just past Porta Romana, which is a short walk from the chaos you probably want a break from anyway.

An old-school Florentine trattoria tucked beside San Lorenzo market, Sergio Gozzi has been feeding the neighborhood forever with the kind of menu that shifts by season rather than trend. The fried zucchini flowers give way to artichokes come winter, and the peposo, beef slow-cooked in wine and whole peppercorns, is the sort of thing you order without looking up. More breathing room than the usual San Lorenzo scramble.

A lampredotto stand across from the Sant'Ambrogio church, where the proprietor hollers orders into the street while you stand on the corner with a goblet of wine. The specialty is cow stomach slow-cooked in broth, chopped, and stuffed into bread with green herb and chile sauce, and Pollini's range of variations, from tomato with artichoke to porcini in season, gives regulars a reason to keep coming back.

Half wine bar, half vinyl record shop, Vineria Sonora is the kind of place that makes a lot of sense at the second glass. The natural wine list leans deep into minimal-intervention Italian producers, with obscure garage makers sitting alongside cult names. Small plates run from 'nduja crostini to wild boar lasagna, with a Calabrian thread running through the menu. The owners also run a spillover bar across the street, which tells you everything about the crowd this place attracts.

A few blocks from the Duomo, this casual counter stop does one thing: pizza fritta, the Neapolitan fried-pizza tradition that never made it onto most Milan menus. The dough is long-fermented and cooked to order, arriving as a puffy, glossy pocket stuffed with salami, cicoli, or ricotta and provola di bufala. Grab extra napkins before you find a ledge to stand at, because the instruction to rip off the top and squeeze out the center is not a metaphor.

The dining room is a former anatomical theatre steps from the Duomo, and the vaulted ceilings and antique bookshelves make the setting feel theatrical without trying. Regina Bistecca is a wood-fired steak restaurant built around Tuscan beef, dry-aged and cooked over flame with the kind of restraint that lets the meat do the arguing. Chianti Classico and Brunello anchor the wine list. It landed on the World's Best Steak Restaurants ranking.