The Best Restaurants in Italy

A Bib Gourmand osteria in Bra's old town, a short walk from a square where you can actually park. The kitchen leans into Piedmontese classics, vitello tonnato, tajarin, and local sausage, but the cooking reads as carefully considered rather than dusty. Portions are generous and the plates are pretty. A couple runs the room with genuine warmth, and the staff manages to be both efficient and relaxed, which in a small Italian dining room is harder than it looks.

Giancarlo Perbellini, the chef behind one of Verona's grand tasting-menu temples, runs this osteria as a kind of antidote to his own reputation. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and the point is exactly that: seasonal Italian classics, a good run of wines by the glass, and prices that don't require a second mortgage. A terrace tucked down a side street off Via Mazzini makes it easy to linger longer than planned.

The wooden ceiling came from an old country haybarn, which tells you something about the room before the food arrives. This is a classic Emilian trattoria, the kind where the charcuterie board alone could end the meal, anchored by culatello di Zibello and fried gnocco. Fresh egg pasta follows, then meat, then a dessert list long enough to cause genuine indecision. The wine list is taken seriously. Michelin Bib Gourmand.

A gasthaus tucked into the pedestrianized center of San Michele, where the wine list is all Alto Adige, the cooking leans on regional recipes, and gorgonzola sauce somehow ends up on arancini without anyone blinking. Herbert Hintner is considered the defining name in this corner of Italian cuisine, and the room reflects that confidence: simple, contemporary, and unfussy. The Michelin Guide awards it a Bib Gourmand.

Bread that takes four days to leaven tells you roughly where you stand with this rustic Sicilian trattoria, tucked into the pedestrianised centre of a medieval village inside the Parco delle Madonie. The kitchen keeps things firmly regional, letting the surrounding countryside dictate the menu. Antipasto arrives as a rotating spread of local vegetables, cheese, meat, and mushrooms. A Michelin Bib Gourmand, and priced like the countryside it cooks from.

Farmhouse dining in the Emilian countryside, where the kitchen leans hard into the regional pantry: stuffed pastas, cured meats, and the kind of slow-cooked ragù that makes you wonder why anyone bothers with anything else. The cooking is traditional and unapologetic, the setting rural and unpretentious, and the Michelin Bib Gourmand signals generous cooking at a price that won't send you into quiet panic when the bill arrives.

A glass-walled kitchen lets you watch the chef work while you eat, which either relaxes or unnerves you depending on your table. This small, quietly modern restaurant in Voghera's historic centre earns a Michelin Bib Gourmand with Lombardian cooking that leans local but bends the rules just enough to keep things interesting. The co-owner steers wine choices toward the Oltrepò Pavese, and half-portions are on offer for anyone exercising restraint.

Vegetables from the family's own garden and orchard end up on the plate here, at a multigenerational Ligurian trattoria that's been an old-school institution in the Apennine interior for as long as anyone can remember. The menu follows the seasons closely, moving through mushrooms, truffles, and chestnut lasagnette with local cheese fondue, with daily market specials folded in. The Michelin Guide awards it a Bib Gourmand, and the welcome is the kind that makes you linger.

An agriturismo tucked into the rolling hills of Collio, where the wine list features only bottles from the estate and the kitchen runs on the same logic: hyper-local, seasonal, and occasionally surprising. The chef works cured meats and aged cheeses into the menu alongside dishes that show a more personal hand. Six tables keep things intimate, and a Michelin Bib Gourmand means bookings fill fast. Call ahead.

A veranda dining room perched above the Tyrrhenian with the sea running to every horizon is a hard setting to argue with. This Sicilian restaurant keeps the cooking clean and ingredient-forward, with an à la carte alongside sharing-style tasting menus and a cocktail list that makes lunchtime feel like a reasonable decision. The Michelin Guide has given it a Bib Gourmand, which tracks for a place that spends its energy on the food.

A suckling pig turns on a spit inside a room built around a fireplace, and that image is basically the whole argument for this Sardinian restaurant in the rural interior near Oliena. The terrace looks out over vineyards and olive groves, the dining rooms are hung with local handicrafts, and the menu stays firmly inland, running through cured meats, pane frattau, kid with fennel, and house-made ice creams. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand.

Montalcino is Brunello country, so a tavern with a wine list deep in old vintages fits right in. This is a rustic trattoria where the kitchen leans hard on Tuscan tradition, and the handmade pici with meat sauce is the kind of unpretentious dish that makes you wonder why anyone bothers with anything else. The Michelin Guide has given it a Bib Gourmand, which makes sense once the bread basket lands.

Tortelli stuffed with Amarone-braised meat is a reasonable argument for making the drive into the Valpolicella hills. This is a cozy trattoria with a fireplace, a veranda, and a terrace for warmer evenings, the kind of room that makes it easy to stay for an extra glass. The wine list leans deep into Verona, with a generous pour-by-the-glass selection. The Michelin Guide has given it a Bib Gourmand, which tells you the cooking punches above the price.

A family trattoria tucked into the Val Serina, where polenta comes several ways and the kitchen holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand. The menu is short on purpose, built around Bergamasco staples: casoncelli with butter and pancetta, bresaola from Orobica cattle, and, when the season allows, the local black truffle. In fine weather the terrace opens onto hills that do most of the decorating. The women run the floor; the man of the house cooks.

Carrù is the town that puts a fattened ox on a pedestal every winter, and this old-school trattoria leans into that identity hard. Piedmontese classics fill the menu: bagna cauda, boiled meats, ravioli, and a hazelnut cake that closes things quietly but well. Ask about the cellar, where a round table for ten in the "Crota dl'amicissia" turns dinner into an event. A Michelin Bib Gourmand, and a few guest rooms sit nearby if the bonet tips you over the edge.

A family trattoria tucked into the Modenese Apennines, where the parents cook and their daughter works the room. Mom handles the hand-rolled pasta and desserts, dad tends the meats, and the whole operation holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Truffle scent drifts through in season. The drive up from Modena on the SP3 takes an hour of switchbacks through green valleys, which regulars treat as part of the meal rather than a detour.

A vaulted ceiling, an open kitchen, and a terrace beside the church of San Carlo Borromeo: the setting alone does a lot of the work. This modern restaurant in a small Apulian village cooks entirely from local ingredients, with herbs from its own kitchen garden. The chef spent formative years in Bologna, and the house-made stuffed pasta remembers that. A Michelin Bib Gourmand.

A grandmother built this family trattoria, her granddaughter now runs the kitchen, and her parents still work the dining room with the kind of attention that makes 1960s wallpaper feel like atmosphere rather than neglect. The menu is Monferrato through and through: vitello tonnato, hand-folded agnolotti, tajarin with porcini. The wine list follows the same logic. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and the prices stay honest enough to order a second carafe.

Bucatini all'amatriciana is the reason to come, and 50 Top Italy named theirs the finest in Rome. Il Matriciano is a proper trattoria in Prati, the kind where old regulars never open the menu and the waiters wear what appear to be period costumes. The room is dressed-up bourgeois, the service formal but warm, and the pasta arrives on fine porcelain exactly as it should, sauce clinging, guanciale doing the heavy lifting.

The spleen sandwich alone has been drawing the brave and the curious to this old-school Palermo institution for longer than anyone working there can remember. It's a casual street food shop in the Kalsa district, with outdoor tables facing the Gothic facade of San Francesco church, serving arancine, panelle, caponata, and cannoli to anyone who bothers to show up. The menu is a short course in what Palermo actually eats.

Carved into the slope of Monte Testaccio, a hill built from ancient broken amphorae, this old-school Roman trattoria has been feeding the neighborhood on quinto quarto, the offal cuts that Testaccio made its own, for what feels like forever. The wine cellar runs deep and the service carries the quiet confidence of six generations. The bucatini all'amatriciana, ranked among Italy's finest, arrives with extra pecorino on the side, unprompted, as it should.

A seafood restaurant perched inside the Regional Park of Monte Conero, with big windows and tables angled so the Adriatic does most of the decorating. The kitchen builds each year's menu around a single theme, creative dishes with a careful hand. You can graze on a couple of street-food bites at lunch or commit to the full dinner menu. When it's warm enough, the outside tables fill up, blankets included for when the wind disagrees.

A butcher shop that never quite stopped being one, Da Gigione Gourmand in Pomigliano d'Arco has grown into a sit-down restaurant where the sandwich is still the main event. The family behind it built a following on aged, carefully sourced cuts and fillings that take the format seriously, backed by a solid list of wines and craft beers. It ranked second on 50 Top Italy's Best Sandwiches list, which tells you where the priorities lie.

A neighborhood provisions shop that never quite decided whether it wanted to be a deli or a trattoria, so it became both. Shelves of organic cheeses, oils, and cured meats share the room with about ten tables where regulars eat cooked dishes and serious sandwiches. Everything points back to Sicily, and the family running it clearly knows the producers behind every jar on the shelf.

The menu calls it a "non-amatriciana," and that framing tells you everything about this Prati restaurant. Shallots cooked down to almost nothing and a touch of balsamic vinegar stand in for the usual guanciale swagger, and it works. The room runs Nordic-minimal, the team runs tight, and the cooking looks outward while keeping one foot in Rome. Fase lands at number eight on 50 Top Italy's Best Amatriciana list, which for a rule-breaking version is a pointed result.

Soft buns stuffed with ingredients sourced almost entirely from Sicilian small producers, this sandwich shop on Piazza Olivella has been running the same game for a while and shows no signs of losing the room. The fillings read like a tour of the island's niche farms: Nebrodi black pork, Sciacca anchovies, Modica chicken. Fresh potato chips on the side, natural wines and craft beers to wash it down.

Orders go through a window cut into the wall, which tells you everything about the format before you've even looked at the menu. Katsusanderia is a Japanese street food counter in Milan serving sando on housemade bread, rice bowls, and sides like potato salad and eggplant in sesame sauce. The drinks run to Japanese beer and sake, nothing fussier. It's a long way from the all-you-can-eat circuit, and the sandwiches are substantial enough that you won't need a second lunch.

A Roman trattoria that has been holding down Campo de' Fiori since forever, right across from the statue of Giordano Bruno, while the tourist traps around it come and go. The menu runs through the Roman classics, and the carbonara is the reason to sit down, made with the kind of ingredient obsession that separates a real kitchen from a souvenir experience. A serious wine cellar rounds things out.

A family osteria in Monteverde Vecchio whose roots trace back to Amatrice, which means the amatriciana here carries the weight of hometown pride. The Rocchi family sources from small regional producers they know personally, and the wine list moves. 50 Top Italy ranked their amatriciana second in all of Italy, which is the kind of credential that makes you order it before you've even sat down properly.

Messina's arancini come with saffron in the rice here, which already sets them apart, and Rosticceria Famulari pushes further with thirty-odd variations, from pistachio to eggplant alla norma to mortadella with stringy cheese. This old-school street food counter in the city center also does pitone and mozzarella in carrozza, the full Messina rotisserie repertoire. It ranked fifth on the 50 Top Italy street food list, which the locals probably already knew.

The supplì here come filled with cacio e pepe, amatriciana, and carbonara, which tells you everything about the kitchen's loyalties. This is a casual Roman street food counter tucked into the old alleys between Regola and Ponte, with a Chesterfield sofa, walls covered in scrawl, and a couple of outdoor benches. The fried rice balls are the whole point, though the mozzarella in carrozza keeps people honest about ordering more than one thing.

Three hundred and twenty hectares of Umbrian estate produce nearly everything on the plate at this countryside restaurant outside Gubbio. The game roams a wildlife reserve on the property; the cured meats are made in-house; the herbs come from the woods just outside. A seven-course tasting menu threads it all into something with a strong sense of place. The wine list is long, and the owner is happy to steer you through it.

A small gourmet restaurant tucked into a romantic alley near Lake Iseo, where the menu changes daily depending on what comes from the market, the lake, the garden, or the surrounding woods. The chef trained alongside some of Franciacorta's most respected names, and the cooking reflects it: territory-driven, waste-conscious, and genuinely demanding. His partner runs the floor and the cellar, which leans toward small natural producers from the region.

A beach club on Lake Orta pulls the first look, but the dining room at this fine-dining restaurant inside a boutique hotel is what keeps people talking. The kitchen runs under Antonino Cannavacciuolo's direction, and the menu moves between à la carte and tasting options, with pasta and secondi that lean into Campanian instincts filtered through northern Italian restraint. The crowd arrived for a weekend and quietly rebooked.

The garden isn't decoration here; it runs across several terraced levels and supplies much of what arrives on the plate. This is a fine dining restaurant on the hills above the Sorrento Coast, where the kitchen cooks Campanian cuisine with a personal point of view rather than a reverential one. Antonino Cannavacciuolo's vision behind the project, and the room carries that particular mixture of genuine quiet and considered comfort that tends to make lunch stretch.

Inside the Galleria Principe di Napoli, Marco Ambrosino runs a fine dining restaurant built around what he calls a Mediterranean collective, a project that treats the region as a living, shifting thing rather than a postcard. A broth refreshed daily for years anchors a menu that otherwise refuses to hold still, pulling flavors from wherever curiosity leads. Comfort-seekers may find it unsettling; everyone else will find it hard to leave.

An aromatic-herb tasting menu sitting alongside a meat-focused one is an unusual way to organize a fine-dining restaurant, and it tells you something about how the chef here thinks. Eugenio Boer's creative Italian cooking leans hard on small producers and classic dishes, then quietly dismantles both in the same bite. The à la carte keeps things flexible for anyone not committing to a full menu.

A vintage petrol pump in the dining room sets the tone for a modern restaurant that's comfortable being a little unexpected. The kitchen works from Piedmontese tradition but doesn't stay there, reworking regional ideas with enough imagination that the results feel like the chef's own. The room is calm and minimalist, the service sharp, and the menu moves easily between meat, fish, and vegetarian without any of those feeling like an afterthought.

The name nods to the year the surrounding hotel opened, and the room leans into that Liberty-era design, but the cooking is firmly now. This contemporary restaurant in Soprabolzano runs a tasting menu built around Alto Adige produce, including Wagyu beef raised on the chef's home turf in the Renon region. A wine list of nearly 400 regional labels gives the kitchen a lot to work with, and non-alcoholic pairings are taken just as seriously.

A candlelit dining room in the old town where the smell of wood hits you before the menu does. This is a Piedmontese restaurant run entirely by women, serving two tasting menus and an à la carte that leans into meat the way the region always has, while also offering seafood for the unconvinced. The cooking is rooted in tradition but steered somewhere more contemporary, with seasonal ingredients doing most of the persuading.

A small, intimate restaurant in Palermo's historic center where the chef reframes Sicilian classics with a modern eye, meat and fish both getting the treatment. The wine list runs entirely Sicilian, with its own section carved out for Etna wines by subregion, which tells you where the kitchen's loyalties lie. The room is simple and the cooking is the point.

Frescoed ceilings from the late 1700s set the scene for a Piedmontese country restaurant that climbs, quite literally, an imposing staircase to reach its dining room inside a former aristocratic palace. The kitchen leans into regional classics, with ravioli del plin as the thread that runs through everything, plus a few seafood detours. The owner steers the wine list toward Monferrato bottles and Champagne with the enthusiasm of someone who has clearly done his homework.

The courtyard, tucked behind Hotel Vilòn, is one of those spots that feels like it belongs to you personally. This is a contemporary Italian restaurant where the chef draws on Campanian roots to rework Mediterranean cooking into something polished without being stiff. The Roman classics, carbonara, cacio e pepe, amatriciana, are all here and handled seriously. The room inside is quietly beautiful, decorated with real care and none of the usual hotel-restaurant pomp.

You cross the Brembo river on foot to reach this high-end agriturismo, meadows and Orobic peaks on all sides. The kitchen cooks alpine and contemporary, with meat and dairy from the land around it doing the heavy lifting. The cheese trolley that closes the meal is its own argument for staying put, and the wine list tilts toward regional labels and naturals, with dozens available by the glass.

Wood-paneled walls and a meat-heavy menu set Ai Gondolieri apart in a city where every other trattoria defaults to fish. Tucked just behind the Guggenheim in Dorsoduro, this rustic restaurant leans into traditional Venetian cooking: braised lamb, cured hams, sweet-and-sour vegetables, and a wine cellar stocked deep enough to keep you from ever looking at the cocktail list, though that's apparently substantial too.

The saffron risotto with ossobuco reduction is the calling card here, carried over from the parent fine-dining restaurant down the block into something looser and more approachable. This is a contemporary Italian bistro where shareable plates of gnocco fritto and the house mondeghili meatballs are designed to be paired with cocktails built specifically around the menu. Milan at its most quietly self-assured.

The ground-floor restaurant inside the W Florence runs on pulsing music and a metropolitan buzz that feels more Tokyo-by-way-of-LA than Tuscany. Akira Back is the chef's Italian debut, and the kitchen plays with Korean, Japanese, and American flavors in a way that's loose and a little theatrical. Cocktails are the natural pairing here, and the bar leans into that obligation happily.

The wine list runs to over 2,000 labels, which is less a list and more a library. Al Carroponte is a contemporary Italian restaurant in Bergamo where the cellar is the point of pride, though the kitchen holds its own with a menu that moves between lobster and caviar and a generous spread of cured hams, cheeses, and finger food. The room buzzes, the crowd lingers, and the owner's obsession with wine gives the whole place its particular energy.

A hidden lift behind the arcades of Piazza Cavour whisks you up to a first-floor dining room where the wallpaper is as colorful as the cooking. This contemporary Italian restaurant pairs an inventive, carefully plated menu with a serious Franciacorta-focused wine list and, come evening, cocktails from the bar downstairs. The chef moves fluently between meat, fish, and vegetarian dishes, and half portions let you cover more ground without consequence.

Dinner in a botanical garden with a tiny vegetable patch growing a few feet from your table sets the tone at this hotel restaurant inside Palazzo Murat. The Attanasio family runs it, and the Mediterranean menu swings between meat and fish depending on the season, with lighter options at lunch. The bar keeps things going after dinner with cocktails and a serious wine list.