The Best Places to Eat and Do in Italy

A bakery that Florentines will cite with a little nostalgic pride, Becagli turns out schiacciata the old-school way, hand-kneaded so the olive oil pools in every dimple. The flatbread becomes the base for panini stuffed with stracchino, fennel salami, or mortadella, and the pastry case holds ancient-grain crostatas and torta della nonna. Stop in for breakfast and the chocolate-stuffed brioche will rearrange your morning plans.

The name on the awning is Japanese, but the spirit is closer to a grandmother's kitchen than a sushi counter. This cozy restaurant near the Duomo was opened to serve the vegetables, curries, and donburi that Milan's many Japanese spots tend to skip entirely. The ka-ree and the potato salad with Japanese mayonnaise are the kind of things you don't realize you've been missing until they're in front of you.

A natural wine bar on a cobbled Trastevere side street that quietly became something more interesting when a new chef arrived with training from France, Norway, and Scotland. The menu shifts constantly, landing somewhere between fermented vegetables, aged fish, and spices you wouldn't expect in Rome. The room stays unfussy; the cooking doesn't. Good luck getting a table without planning ahead.

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.

A chemist who became a baker is either a cautionary tale or a very good idea, and at Le Polveri it's the latter. This small all-day cafe and bread laboratory turns out laminated pastries, focaccia slicked with olive oil, and a short lunch menu built around whatever the team feels like baking that day. The coffee is serious, and the bread, spread thick with whipped butter and house jam, is the kind of thing people walk across neighborhoods for.

Just off the Ponte Vecchio, this wine bar doubles as a shop, so if the staff talk you into something you love, you can take a case home or ship bottles abroad. The team skews deep into small, passionate Italian producers, and they know their stuff. Charcuterie and warm crostini keep things civilized while you taste. It fills quickly with locals who seem to have strong opinions about everything, which is exactly the right atmosphere for a place like this.

Bookshelves, rotating art on the walls, and a vegetarian menu shaped by the chef's well-traveled palate make this Santa Croce cafe-restaurant a little harder to categorize than most. That's the point. Locals fill the place at lunch for mixed platters and tuck into weekend brunches of pancakes and scrambles. The food leans global, the room feels like someone's very curated living room, and the music is always good.

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 craft beer bar so small it barely fits its own reputation, this Trastevere institution pours around a dozen rotating taps covering Italy, Belgium, Germany, the U.S., and the U.K., with a tight bottle selection behind the bar. The staff actually knows beer, which is rarer than it sounds in a neighborhood where tourists outnumber locals. Snag one of the few street tables if you can, and watch Trastevere do its thing around you.

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.

A two-story food hall tucked inside Milan's main train station, with over 30 vendors covering everything from pizza al taglio to Chinese dumplings to Genovese farinata. Davide Longoni's bakery counter is worth seeking out, and Mag, the bar upstairs, is a sibling of Milan's celebrated speakeasy 1930. The kind of place where you can grab a cocktail and a slice of focaccia di Recco and call it a perfectly respectable lunch.

The cocoa perfume hits before the door does. This old-school chocolate shop near the Pantheon has been here since the Savoy court moved from Turin, and it moves at the same unhurried pace. Glass cases hold more than 80 handmade chocolates and bonbons; in autumn, locals come specifically for the marrons glacés, whole or as paste. A small box is a perfectly decent souvenir, though a kilo starts to feel like a personal tradition.

A kiosk with an old "Cafè Du Parc" sign still tilting off the roof sits at the junction of three Rome neighborhoods, pulling triple duty as a specialty coffee stop in the morning, a place to idle through the afternoon, and a low-key bar by evening. Draft cocktails and natural wines bring in locals who don't mind trams rattling past on the cobblestones. Staff playlists give way to vinyl, and nothing about the pace ever tips into trying too hard.

A gelato shop run by a husband-and-wife team on Via de' Ginori, My Sugar churns classic flavors alongside more unexpected ones, including dark chocolate spiked with local Chianti. Florence takes its gelato seriously, and this younger operation holds its own among the old guard. The seasonal fruit flavors skew crowd-pleasing; the green tea and pure peanut suggest someone is quietly having fun with the menu.

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 gelateria in Monteverde Vecchio where the flavors lean restrained rather than sugar-forward, which is either a revelation or a disappointment depending on what you came for. Marco Radicioni trained under one of Rome's gelato legends and the house sensibility shows in the sourcing. Specialty coffee and pastries have since turned it into a full third-wave stop, so you can reasonably linger without just holding a cone.

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.

The display cases at this old-school Roman pasticceria are packed with maritozzi, the whipped cream-filled buns that have been a local obsession forever. The family has been running the place for generations, and the seasonal rotation holds: bigne in spring, colombe at Easter, pandoro come Christmas. Order at the counter and take your pastries next door to Caffé Regoli, where the kitchen will bring everything to your table with coffee.

A gelateria where the sugar is dialed down on purpose, letting the actual fruit and cream do the talking. The sleek, minimal shop is the Milan outpost of the Pavé team, and the small-batch philosophy shows in the sourcing: Bronte pistachio, Piedmont hazelnut, fair-trade chocolate. Seasonal experiments like ricotta or white chocolate with lime and salt rotate through, which keeps regulars guessing. Bring cash and a strong opinion about cones versus cups.

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 truffle-stuffed panini here are small, perfect, and entirely sufficient reason to push through the door on Via dè Tornabuoni. This old-school Florentine cafe and gourmet shop has been pouring aperitivo and selling truffle everything, from infused honey to anchovy jars, for well over a century. Antinori supplies the wine, so the glasses are serious. Come for a stand-up snack and leave with a small, expensive bag of something you'll justify as a souvenir.

The catch comes from Fiumicino and Anzio, and the cellar runs to older European whites most restaurants wouldn't bother with. Da Michele is a seafood and wine restaurant in the residential San Paolo district, the kind of place that looks like nothing from outside and runs like a tight ship within. Regulars have been filing back for years, and the wine list alone pulls people in from across the city.

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.

Saffron and rose ice cream in the shadow of the Palazzo Vecchio is a combination Florence doesn't offer often. This Iranian restaurant in Dante's old neighborhood fills a real gap in a city where the dining scene still tilts heavily Renaissance. The room leans into it, with decor that feels like a genuine gesture toward home rather than a theme. Koobideh, joojeh kebabs, and ghormeh sabzi make up the core of it.

A tiny pizza al taglio laboratorio a short walk from Circo Massimo, run by a Bonci protégé who names his pies with a straight face and a sense of humor. The long-fermented dough bakes into something audibly crunchy, and the toppings lean on small central Italian farms. The Ragùver, loaded with slow-cooked meat sauce and Parmigiano, tastes like someone's Sunday lunch decided to become a slice shop.

The Beijing-born chef behind Sinosteria spent decades running Rome's first Thai restaurant before opening this place to cook the Chinese food she wanted to cook. A casual neighborhood restaurant, it moves between regional Chinese traditions without apology, and the sommelier son running the front of house keeps a natural wine list that has no business being this interesting. The room draws locals from the surrounding residential stretch of Marconi who seem blissfully unbothered by the category confusion.

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.

An elegant seafood restaurant a short walk from the Colosseum, Tempio di Iside leans hard into crudi: fish carpaccio, sea urchin roe, langoustines, oysters. Pasta with sweet red shrimp and fresh pecorino quietly dismantles the no-cheese-with-seafood rule, and the spaghetti with clams holds its own. Book ahead if you want one of the outdoor tables in summer, and come prepared: the fish is fresh and the bill reflects that.

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.