The Best Places in Italy

A trattoria in Teramo's historic centre run by three friends, two in the kitchen and one managing the room and wine, all of them young enough to still be excited about it. The cooking stays rooted in Abruzzo, with the occasional contemporary nudge that sharpens rather than distracts. The menu is short, the sourcing is local, and the desserts tend to linger in the memory longer than expected.

A tuff-stone building on the Gianfranco Fino wine estate, with picture windows framing the vineyards and a terrace for when you need even more countryside. The restaurant upstairs serves modern meat and fish dishes, many cooked with the estate's own wines, alongside a vegetarian menu built around produce from the kitchen garden. The wine list is essentially the winery's back catalogue, which makes ordering feel less like a decision and more like a tasting.

Picture windows framing the Umbrian hills flood the dining room with the kind of light that makes you want to linger. This is the restaurant inside Borghi dell'Eremo resort, where the kitchen leans into traditional Umbrian cooking and the estate raises its own rabbits, which end up in a ragù over saffron tagliatelle. Unhurried, landscape-forward, and probably not where you're going if you're in a rush to get somewhere else.

Inside a palazzo off Genoa's grandest square, Etra hides its entrance deep in the building's courtyard, which is either annoying or atmospheric depending on your mood. Once inside, the dark, minimalist dining room doubles as a rotating art gallery, the name itself being an anagram of arte. Creative Italian tasting menus run the kitchen's ambitions, built around technical precision and an obvious restlessness to keep things moving.

A wood-fired oven running through the dining room signals what kind of place this is: a polished contemporary Italian restaurant tucked into a hotel in the Modenese countryside, where the kitchen plays both sides, handmade pasta with ragù alongside fresh fish and aged grilled meats. The sommelier navigates a serious wine list with quiet confidence and will pour even the coveted bottles by the glass.

Dinner on a terrace shaded by lemon trees, in the old center of Modica, is a reasonable way to spend an evening. This is a family-run restaurant where two sisters split the duties, one in the kitchen and one running the room, and together they cook modern Sicilian food that quietly folds in spices and exotic notes without making a fuss about it. The wine list is long and the recommendations are good.

The name means "fairytale" in Piedmontese, and the dining room of this fine dining restaurant does gaze out over the Langa hills like something from a storybook. The kitchen leans into local tradition without getting stuck in it, running a tasting menu built around the estate's own vegetable garden alongside an à la carte that moves between meat, fish, and produce with quiet confidence. The wine list is thoughtfully kept.

A family trattoria on the western shore of Lake Garda, with a cellar room where the smell of wine does most of the hosting before anyone takes your order. The dining room runs warm and old-school, the enclosed veranda lets in softer light, and the kitchen keeps things Italian and seasonal without making a fuss about it. The kind of place where the cooking tastes like someone's grandmother approved the recipe.

An open kitchen anchors the dining room at this Indonesian-influenced restaurant in Treviso, where an Italian chef with deep roots in the cuisine serves contemporary takes on the classics. The space splits between a cocktail bar with street-food snacks and a proper sit-down restaurant, which is a useful thing to know before you walk in underdressed. The wine list leans heavily on organic and biodynamic labels, a pairing that makes more sense than it sounds.

Old wooden beams overhead, a period courtyard below, and a kitchen running two tasting menus that split the difference between new experiments and long-standing signatures. Feva is a creative fine-dining restaurant tucked into the historic center of Castelfranco Veneto, where the chef keeps one menu in constant motion and another anchored to the dishes regulars would riot over losing. A shorter lunch menu keeps things accessible when the mood isn't fully ceremonial.

The olive oil on the table comes straight from the estate, which tells you something about how seriously this Umbrian restaurant takes its pantry. It sits in an elegant villa above Todi, with views that make lingering over a long lunch feel obligatory rather than indulgent. The menu stays rooted in regional tradition while nudging things into modern territory, and the wine list throws in a surprisingly serious champagne selection for a hilltop in Umbria.

A medieval tower inside one of Europe's smallest walled towns makes for a striking dining room, and the chef leans into the contrast: vaulted stone overhead, modern plates below. This contemporary restaurant in Val Venosta runs on regional and estate-grown ingredients, including Wagyu raised on the property. The outdoor terrace books out fast in summer, so plan ahead.

Tucked into a quiet residential corner of L'Aquila's historic centre, FØRMA is an intimate contemporary restaurant with a minimalist room that means the food does all the talking. The chef keeps his dishes to three core ingredients, leaning on local Abruzzo produce and the occasional fermented note. A dessert that disguises white-chocolate mousse as meringue with a dusting of liquorice gives you the general idea: restrained until it isn't.

Tucked inside an educational complex on the edge of the city, this contemporary Italian restaurant is where the chef's Abruzzese roots do most of the talking. Vivid colors, confident flavors, and a menu that feels rooted in home cooking without being stuck there. The space shares a building with a bistrot, which tells you the setup is a little unconventional, but the food plays it straight.

The smell of warm bread hits you before you've sat down, which tells you something about how Massimo Bottura runs this casual Emilian trattoria. The menu moves from deeply rooted regional cooking, aged pancetta, handmade tortellini, into quieter moments of creativity. Lambrusco gets an entire page of the wine list, as it should in Modena. The room is intimate and a little buzzy, and the whole place feels like a love letter to the region rather than a résumé.

A family-run fine dining restaurant in an old villa on the piazza, with a medieval tower out back housing over a thousand wine labels. The kitchen leans classic-modern, giving equal time to meat and fish, with the kind of ingredients (foie gras, scampi, lobster, caviar) that signal you're not splitting a pizza. The Frosio family has been doing this for a long time, and the front-of-house polish shows it.

The kitchen lives inside the 16th-century workshop of sculptor Antonello Gagini, which gives this contemporary restaurant a better backstory than most. A Piedmontese chef works the tension between northern Italian technique and Sicilian pantry, landing somewhere unexpected: tagliatelle made with 30 egg yolks meets tuna bottarga and citron, mussels take on 'nduja and Vietnamese bisque. Nestled between the Vucciria market and the Cala harbor, the room matches the ambition.

Korean cooking that has anchored this corner of Rome for a long time, with a menu built around rice, restorative soups, and shared plates meant to crowd the middle of the table. It reads as a casual, convivial Korean restaurant, generous in portions and calibrated in the push-pull between sweet-sour and heat. One dessert closes the menu, a detail worth knowing before you arrive hoping for options.

A 13th-century armoury at the edge of the Leocorno contrada, now a candlelit dinner spot a short walk from Il Campo. The dining room pairs medieval stonework with mid-century furniture, which shouldn't work but does. The kitchen leans into Sienese meat cookery while drifting occasionally toward the sea. Below it all, a wine cellar carved from Etruscan tufa holds around 300 labels, which is a very good reason to linger.

A nineteenth-century building with a balcony running the inner courtyard sets the tone for this Piedmontese restaurant in the small town of Caluso. The menu is a fairly faithful portrait of the region: lots of meat, some fish, vegetables that sometimes come from the kitchen garden out back. It feels like someone's grandmother's house if grandmother had a strong opinion about local sourcing and a cellar worth investigating.

The picture windows frame the Tyrrhenian Sea so completely that the blue of the water bleeds into the dining room. This is a proper sit-down restaurant on Capri, where the kitchen runs classic Italian dishes alongside modern reinterpretations, the kind of place where a lemon tartlet arrives dusted with caper and pepper powder and somehow makes perfect sense. Dress a little, bring someone worth impressing, and let the bay do half the work.

A Baroque palazzo on a quiet piazza, with a fine staircase leading up to a quietly stylish dining room, is the kind of setting that could coast on atmosphere alone. This fine dining restaurant doesn't, though. The kitchen turns out creative regional cooking built around local meat and fish, served as a four, eight, or more course surprise menu. Book the terrace table for two early, very early.

The dining room sits right on the edge of Lake Orta, with views that stretch out to the Island of San Giulio, which is the kind of backdrop that makes it hard to focus on the menu. This is a hotel restaurant with Mediterranean cooking that occasionally takes a detour into more inventive territory. The roof terrace bar upstairs handles aperitifs and after-dinner drinks, and the wine cellar is well stocked for the serious-minded.

The outdoor terrace sits a few steps from the Viareggio promenade, which makes choosing a table inside a decision you'll quietly regret. This is a seafood restaurant where the kitchen leans on personal technique rather than obvious spectacle, the wine list rewards browsing, and the service is the kind that feels attentive without being theatrical. Bring people you want to linger with; the sea view does a lot of the conversational heavy lifting.

Stone columns and vaulted ceilings from a centuries-old Dominican monastery frame a dining room that goes firmly minimalist, with pale floors and a glass-fronted wine wall as the main decoration. The contemporary menu leans into Puglian ingredients without making a fuss about it. Service is the kind that's attentive without hovering, which in a room this old and serious is exactly what the architecture already asks of everyone.

A courtyard at the back opens up in warm weather, and it's the kind of detail that turns a competent dinner into a whole evening. This is a proper sit-down restaurant in the center of Stradella, serving classic Italian cooking nudged gently toward the contemporary, land and sea trading places across the menu. The room is put together with quiet care, and the service has enough warmth to make you feel noticed without making you feel managed.

Full-size bronze gongs anchor the room at this sleek contemporary Chinese restaurant near Porta Venezia, setting a tone that's somewhere between meditative and quietly theatrical. The menu runs Chinese traditional with a modern edge, and the staff will walk you through it without being asked. A whole tasting menu dedicated to Peking duck suggests the kitchen knows where its strengths lie.

A former post-house turned full-on regional restaurant in the South Tyrolean countryside, Hanswirt decorates its dining rooms in classic Tyrolean style and grows much of what it serves on a farm in the Senales valley. Goat kid and lamb from that farm anchor the menu, with freshwater fish alongside, though the kitchen slides south occasionally for a braised aubergine tartare with burrata. A hotel of the same name sits quietly around the back.

The open kitchen keeps things honest at this contemporary Italian restaurant on the Viareggio coast, where the menu splits cleanly between meat and fish and French technique quietly shapes both sides. The maître knows the cellar as well as the kitchen, and the cellar runs deep, Sassicaia to Petrus, so dinner here has a way of becoming a longer conversation than you planned.

A lit fireplace and wooden furniture set the tone at this family-run trattoria in Udine, where the cooking is rooted in Friuli but not afraid to wander. Frico with Montasio and plum gnocchi in clarified butter share the menu with tuna tataki and bottarga, and a thoughtfully built vegan menu sits alongside all of it. The kind of room where the warmth is structural, not decorative.

The switchback road up from the Amalfi Coast is genuinely punishing, which is part of why the sea view from the terrace hits so hard when you finally arrive. This is a regional trattoria in the cliff-hanging village of Furore, where the Marisa Cuomo winery sits directly across the street, a convenient arrangement. The kitchen leans on local ingredients cooked in a traditional idiom with enough personal touches to keep things interesting.

Perched on a big pedestrian piazza at the edge of Alba's old town, this trattoria-style spot splits its menu between Piedmontese classics and whatever fish looked good at the market that morning. The breaded anchovies with saor sauce show up on most lists of reasons to come. Local wines and regional beers fill out a drinks list that takes both seriously, which in Piedmont is either obvious or everything, depending on whom you ask.

Four tables tucked behind a delicatessen that has been selling cured meats in Modena since, roughly, forever. The menu at this tiny trattoria is a straightforward argument for Emilian cooking: gnocco fritto, tortellini in capon broth, slow-cooked beef with mashed potatoes. The charcuterie comes from free-range Mora Romagnola pigs, which is the kind of detail that separates a place from its imitators. Book ahead, because four tables fill fast.

A modern Italian restaurant set inside an old monastery, with a wine cellar dining room and a courtyard terrace when the weather cooperates. The chef cooks personal, Italian-rooted food with the occasional South American lean, a nod to his Ecuadorian wife, who runs the front of house and keeps the wine list unusually interesting. Colorful, generous plates in a setting that makes the slightly out-of-the-way drive feel like exactly the point.

The seventeenth-century Carracci school ceiling sets the tone before you've ordered a thing: this is a fine dining room inside the Grand Hotel Majestic, dressed for occasions. The chef bridges Naples and Bologna with quiet confidence, a contemporary Mediterranean menu moving between sea and land. The sommelier is serious, but the cocktail pairings are the unexpected move worth noting.

A centuries-old stone complex on the road to Rome, now home to a quietly serious Umbrian restaurant run by three brothers, two in the kitchen and one steering the wine in the dining room. The cooking draws on local traditions with a Venetian thread woven through, the result of the family's roots. Herbs come from the garden out back, and the portions are the kind that make you revise your dessert plans.

A garden gazebo for summer candlelit dinners, and a hushed, few-table dining room that earns its advance booking in winter: I Salotti is a creative restaurant anchored to its own farm, so the menu moves with what the land is doing. The wine cellar, assembled over many years, runs to more than two thousand Italian labels. Chiusi is not exactly on everyone's Tuscan itinerary, which is rather the point.

A garden terrace with a front-row view of Orvieto's Duomo sets the scene at this modern Italian restaurant tucked into the old city. The chef works a seasonal menu built around regional ingredients, and the wine list leans into local Umbrian bottles with the kind of care that makes you order a second glass before you've decided on dessert. Unhurried and unshowy, it's a good argument for lingering over lunch.

A dessert called i-CLOUD, a soft yogurt foam over vanilla panna cotta with sorbets, tells you something about the ambitions here. This is a contemporary Italian restaurant in Rimini where the menu leans hard into Adriatic fish, treated with modern technique but enough substance that you leave full. The room is all white walls, mirrors, and glass, with a garden terrace that earns its keep in warmer months.

A family-run trattoria in Carpi where the pasta is the whole point and nobody pretends otherwise. The menu runs deep into Emilian tradition, the kind of place where tortellini in Parmesan cream and gramigna with ragu feel less like choices than obligations. Desserts follow suit with sbrisolona and zuppa inglese. The room is warm, unhurried, and loud with the particular happiness of people who know exactly what they ordered.