The Best Places to Eat and Do in Italy

Picture windows framing the valley is the first thing you notice, before the menu, before the room. This is a polished contemporary restaurant where a younger generation has quietly transformed an old family banqueting hall into something more personal. The kitchen runs on strict seasonality, a concise à la carte alongside a seven-course surprise tasting menu. On warm evenings, the panoramic terrace makes the whole setup feel slightly theatrical, in the best sense.

Three tables face the kitchen directly, with a wood fire burning behind the pass, and those are the ones to ask for. This is a contemporary Italian restaurant in the Emilia-Romagna hills, run by a young chef who trained in starred kitchens before coming home to do things his own way. The menu comes in three versions, ranging from an open-handed tasting format to a vegetarian route, all built around a cooking style that shifts as he goes.

Guests are handed off to an aperitif in a cave-like rock room before the meal proper begins in dining rooms where open kitchens are framed like gallery paintings. This is a serious Umbrian fine-dining destination, set above a lake with a lawn that earns a moment before you go in. The menu hinges on a choice between lighter and longer tasting formats, or a structured à la carte pulled from two distinct sections of the kitchen's creative and classic repertoire.

A restored farmhouse on the Milanese plain where the dining room centers on a large stone fireplace and the wine cellar is open for a wander before you eat. This is a classic countryside restaurant, the kind that splits its menu between Mediterranean fish dishes and old Lombard meat preparations without making a fuss about either. The glass-enclosed veranda works in every season, and the cellar gives serious wine drinkers something to argue about on the way in.

A medieval castle jutting into its own lake is an unusual home for a restaurant, yet here we are. The kitchen runs tasting menus and a broad à la carte of modern meat and fish dishes, the local Vino Santo pours with dinner, and in summer the terrace over the water fills up fast enough that a reservation is less optional than it sounds. The adjacent bar and castle tours round out what is a quietly theatrical evening.

A seafood restaurant on a piazza anchored by the old church of San Frediano in Cestello, where the room feels relaxed but quietly dressed up. The kitchen leans contemporary and fish-forward, from raw preparations and tasting menus to a daily catch you can walk up and point at. The bar runs a thoughtful cocktail list with tapas pairings, and the wine list keeps serious Italian verticals, Masseto and Ornellaia among them.

A Palermo institution that spent years as the glamour of Mondello beach is back in the city center, in a multi-floor space where a café and cocktail bar occupy the ground floor and an elegant Sicilian dining room sits upstairs. The kitchen turns out creative reinterpretations of Sicilian classics alongside old Charleston signatures, including a whisky-flambéed fillet carved tableside. The kind of room where the sommelier knows every bottle by name.

A short walk from St. Mark's Square, this contemporary seafood restaurant leans into what the kitchen calls lagoon fusion, local Venetian catch dressed up with occasional detours through the Orient. The menu shifts with the season, following whatever the lagoon is actually giving up that week. The wine list runs deep, with some genuinely rare vintages tucked in among the usual suspects.

A short walk from the Cathedral of Monreale, this rustic-elegant restaurant makes a strong case for modern Sicilian seafood cookery without letting the modernness get in the way of the flavours. The kitchen leans on pristinely fresh crudo and pasta that bridges tradition and invention, and the desserts have a reputation for outlasting the meal in the memory. A good reason to linger in Monreale longer than the tourist coaches do.

The dining room feels like a private salon someone forgot to lock, all warm hush and gracious old-Florence manners. Cibrèo is a proper sit-down Tuscan restaurant that has been cooking the same dishes long enough to make that a point of pride, not a limitation. Pork liver with lemon, squab stuffed with mostarda, rabbit with sweet-and-sour onions: the menu reads like a letter home from a Florence that still exists here.

The vaulted dining room used to be a celebrated local address called Cavallino, and the bones of that history still set the mood. Ciccio Bistrot is a Piedmontese trattoria that takes its regionalism seriously, running a menu of traditional dishes with playful names, a daily handful of off-menu specials, and agnolotti del plin you dress yourself. The owner steers the wine pairings with the confidence of someone who has heard every wrong answer.

Perched at the highest point of Ostuni's whitewashed old town, this contemporary Apulian restaurant sits inside a restored historic residence, with a barrel-vaulted dining room and a small citrus courtyard for summer evenings. The kitchen takes regional ingredients and reworks them with a light, modern hand. The terrace catches the sunset in a way that feels almost unfairly cinematic. Dinner runs formal; lunch shifts to something easier.

A centuries-old olive grove frames this rustic farmhouse restaurant tucked into the Mediterranean scrub above the Cilento coast. Stone walls and heavy beams set the room, and a small terrace opens things up in summer. The cooking is regional but updated, the kind of place where the wine list runs deep and the pasta is the main event. Quiet enough to feel like a secret, far enough from the highway to mean it.

A big glazed wall frames the Bergamo hills from an angle most people never see, and that view sets the tone for the whole meal. This is a polished, sit-down restaurant where the kitchen builds modern, seasonal dishes from local Lombard ingredients, with a particular pull toward freshwater fish, serious enough that the house runs a dedicated tasting menu around it. The hills, the fish, and the careful cooking make for an unusually focused afternoon.

The herb and spice garden outside feeds the kitchen directly, and the kitchen belongs to the Brandini wine estate, so the terroir argument runs from the glass to the plate. This is a contemporary Piedmontese restaurant where the cooking stays close to the Langhe, digging into local Fassona beef and hyperlocal aromatics. A vegetarian menu runs alongside the main one. Large windows frame the vineyards, and on cold days the fireplace does its part.

Two pairs of brothers run this contemporary Italian restaurant in a renovated Art Nouveau villa: one pair owns the land and raises the meat, the other runs the kitchen. The result is a menu that feels unusually connected from farm to plate. Tasting menus and à la carte both, with Venetian roots and a colorful, image-conscious style. In summer, tables spill outside into views of the Euganean Hills.

Beautiful ceilings in a historic Catanian building set the room before a single plate arrives. This is a creative Sicilian restaurant where the chef reworks the city's own specialities through personal memory rather than textbook tradition, naming dishes after mornings and animals in ways that make more sense once you taste them. The tasting menu leans on contrast and surprise, which is either what you're in the mood for or it isn't.

A former sheepfold on the edge of a hilltop village, now a creative restaurant where exposed stone meets contemporary lighting across several low-ceilinged rooms. The chef came home to Molise and brought French technique with him, threading it through local and seasonal ingredients, many from his own garden. The result sits somewhere between tradition and something harder to place, which seems to be the entire point.

A garden frames the dining room through wide picture windows at this creative Italian restaurant tucked inside a hotel on Bologna's quieter side. The kitchen moves across vegetarian, meat, and fish dishes without committing to any single lane, and tasting menus sit alongside à la carte for those who prefer to graze rather than surrender the wheel. The baba with pastry cream and sour cherries has a reputation that precedes it.

The open kitchen sends energy through a room painted in sharp, bright colors, which feels deliberate given that the surrounding streets of Palermo's old town are all crumbling ochre and shadow. This modern bistro runs on contemporary Sicilian cooking, the kind where Mediterranean instincts get pushed somewhere a little unexpected. Locals and curious visitors share close tables without anyone performing either role too hard.

A crotto is a cave-carved dining room built into rock, and this one in Malnate has been serving the mountain cooking of Valtellina for generations. Wooden tables, period furniture, and a summer veranda that looks out over a sandstone wall and garden give it a genuinely unhurried feel. The menu runs from buckwheat pizzoccheri to more unexpected pairings, the kind of traditional restaurant where the kitchen knows exactly when to stay put and when to wander.

Soft spotlights keep the room dim enough that you forget what time it is, which is probably the point. This small, romantic modern Italian restaurant in central Ferrara runs on seasonal ingredients handled with care, the menu moving between meat and fish in equal measure. The dessert course gets particular attention, treated less as an afterthought and more as its own argument. A young, enthusiastic team runs the floor with warmth that never tips into fuss.

A contemporary tasting-menu restaurant on the first floor of an old palazzo above Genoa's ancient port, with views that do half the work before the kitchen starts. The cooking leans Ligurian but arrives through a fine-dining lens, with three menus that move through composed, technique-driven plates. The kind of place where the chef's philosophy gets spelled out on the plate rather than the menu cover.

A tucked-away Piedmontese restaurant where the menu opens with a section called "Lenitivi," small bites designed for aperitivo pairing that reward slow reading. The kitchen works in a modern, farm-rooted style, reinterpreting regional produce with enough technique to notice but not so much that the food stops tasting like itself. A social table seats up to six for something more communal, and the service keeps pace without hovering.

Set inside the Cantine Nervi winery, this contemporary restaurant wraps you around an open kitchen with a long counter for eating alongside the cooks or proper tables if you prefer. The menu leans creative, and while Piedmontese meat is no surprise, the kitchen keeps slipping in seafood, including a raw tuna plate built for dipping into sauces with a lean toward the East. House wines dominate the list, many poured by the glass.

A small library of cookbooks lines the wall, which tells you something about the kind of dinner you're in for. This creative restaurant in the Oltrarno channels the feel of a French bistrot while the kitchen draws on Venezuelan, French, Spanish, and Italian training. Seasonal Tuscan produce lands alongside kombu and koji without any of it feeling like a pitch. Vegetarian and vegan dishes are clearly flagged, a thoughtful touch that rarely gets mentioned until you need it.

A summer terrace shaded by old trees marks the edge of Florence where the city gives way to Tuscan hills, and Da Bibe has been feeding people from that spot for longer than anyone can comfortably remember. It's a trattoria in the old sense, with cured meats and crostini leading into pici al ragù and the slow-braised beef peposo. The sixth generation runs the place now, which means nobody's fiddling with the recipes.

A glass cabinet near the entrance holds whatever the fishmonger next door landed that morning, and that cabinet is where you should start before you even look at the menu. This is a casual seafood restaurant in Sorrento where the cooking stays out of the way, letting straightforward preparations do the flattering. Ask the staff what came in; they'll steer you better than any printed page will.

A walled medieval town split by the Adda River is an unlikely setting for a restaurant that pairs rustic stone interiors with modern plating, yet here we are. Tables spill under a portico in warmer months, and the kitchen leans into Lombardian cooking, lightening and modernising it without losing the thread. The wine list has been assembled slowly over years, and it shows.

A restaurant where salt cod gets its own dedicated menu, sharing the room with serious meat cookery, is a fairly confident statement of priorities. The chef comes from a family of butchers and spent years cooking in a hill town whose annual festival is devoted entirely to baccalà, so the obsessions here run deep. The space is calm and tucked away from the seafront, the kind of place where you eat what the cook actually believes in.

An 18th-century ceramic stove anchors the dining room at this family-run restaurant in Piacenza's countryside, where the colorful mix of period and vintage decor manages to feel lived-in rather than staged. The kitchen covers both meat and fish, though the fish dishes are what regulars drive out here for. Service is the relaxed, professional kind where staff seem to know everyone and the wine list runs deep enough to keep you at the table longer than planned.

A white-on-white dining room a few blocks from the Jesolo seafront, where the kitchen leans hard into the grill and the catch comes in daily. This is a sit-down seafood restaurant, tablecloths and all, run by a couple who have been at it for decades and still work the floor themselves. In summer, a garden bar softens the formality. The family tends a kitchen garden on Sant'Erasmo, the vegetable island in the Venetian lagoon.

Tucked inside a palazzo hotel in Cannaregio, this creative tasting-menu restaurant is the project of a Spanish chef who decided that Venice needed more Japanese technique in its life. The menu leans into local Venetian ingredients while quietly subverting them, and the walled garden setting makes the whole thing feel like a dinner party only you were told about.

Berkel slicers near the door announce the priorities at this country trattoria tucked into a small Piedmontese hamlet, where local cured meats, freshwater fish, and snails in several forms are the point. The cheese trolley arrives in force, and the cellar leans toward small regional producers without ignoring the rest of Europe. On a grey winter afternoon, with a fire nearby and risotto incoming, the grayness becomes someone else's problem.

A seat overlooking the tourist harbour in Viareggio, this old-school seafood institution has been feeding the city long enough that regulars don't bother consulting the menu. The kitchen handles crustaceans and deep-water catch with quiet confidence, and the spaghetti alla Trabaccolara, a Viareggio recipe built on tomato and fish, is the dish locals will mention unprompted. The room is classic and elegant, the service professional without being stiff.

A family-run restaurant carved into the upper Sassi, with a small terrace and a dining room that feels like someone's home, if someone's home had a serious wine list. The father cooks contemporary Basilicatan food, while mother and daughter run the floor with the easy confidence of people who've been feeding strangers for years. Tasting menus and à la carte both available, which is a civilized way to operate.

A trattoria that has been feeding Cusago locals for decades, with the village's medieval castle visible just outside. The menu splits evenly between fish and meat, and the kitchen takes both seriously enough that neither feels like an afterthought. Two formal dining rooms suit a slow dinner, while the courtyard fills up in summer. Cusago is a short hop from Milan, which is reason enough to point the car west.