The Best Places in Italy

The terrace here has been hanging over the Bay of Naples for as long as anyone can remember, which tells you something about the view before the food even arrives. Lunch runs as a relaxed seafood spot; evenings shift into fine-dining mode with a different name and a different register. The chef leans into classic Campanian fish cookery with enough of a contemporary nudge to keep things from feeling like a museum.

The picture windows face the Sforza Castle, and that view alone explains a lot of the room's energy. Il Cairoli is a hotel restaurant with its own street entrance and a menu split between Milanese classics, ossobuco risotto and mondeghili meatballs among them, and lighter seasonal plates that change with the market. Lunch runs quicker and cheaper, which pulls in a crowd that has somewhere to be afterward.

The bar-cum-pasticceria means you have a credible excuse to stop in at almost any hour. Il Calandrino is a contemporary Italian restaurant run by the same family behind the three-Michelin-starred Le Calandre next door, and the cooking moves between creative seafood plates and old-school house favourites that regulars have been ordering for years. The room is elegant without being stiff, and the chocolate layer cake with zabaglione alone justifies the detour to Rubano.

A stone warrior from 500 BC lends his name to this Milanese trattoria devoted entirely to Abruzzo, a region whose cooking doesn't often make it this far north. The menu leans on small producers: aged hams, aged cheeses, mutton, lamb cooked a few different ways, and grilled skewers that smell like a country feast. If you thought Abruzzo was mainly a wine footnote, this place quietly argues otherwise.

A farmhouse restaurant in Piedmont wine country where the menu reads like a love letter to the region: plin in roast meat sauce, tongue millefeuille, pigeon, and a wine list that barely looks beyond the local hills. The chef has been running the kitchen for decades, and contemporary dishes turn up alongside the classics without making a fuss about it. In good weather, the garden terrace overlooking the pool is hard to argue with.

A contemporary restaurant a short drive from Asti's center, where the menu splits neatly between Piedmontese classics, plin pasta and all, and fish dishes that lean considerably more adventurous. The chef treats those two halves as separate creative projects rather than an uneasy compromise, which keeps things interesting. A relaxed, modern room in a quiet residential neighborhood, the kind of place locals know before anyone else does.

A sixteenth-century palazzo beside Mantua's historic center, with a courtyard terrace built around a fifteenth-century well that makes the whole room feel like a stage set. This is a polished restaurant where the kitchen balances meat and fish with modern technique, the kind of place where dessert arrives before you've decided whether to order it. Smart but not stiff, and the terrace fills fast on warm evenings.

An agriturismo outside Brescia where the menu shifts nearly every week because the seasons say so. Much of what lands on the table is grown or raised on the property, then put over fire with a discipline that keeps the cooking tasting like food, not technique. The barbecue leans into offal and vegetables in equal measure, and the house goat's milk butter, served soft enough to spread with a glance, is the kind of detail people mention unprompted on the drive home.

A restored noble residence perched above the Marche maquis, with the Adriatic glinting in the distance, is a pretty good room in which to eat well. This is a gourmet restaurant where a young Neapolitan chef produces contemporary Italian cooking that leans hard into the region and the Mediterranean without drowning in either. The kitchen's own agricultural estate supplies the olive oils and wines, which is the sort of farm-to-table claim that here has paperwork behind it.

The dining room sits inside a building that once housed a Workers' Mutual Aid Society, and it still carries that civic dignity, with tall windows, classic furnishings, and an atmosphere that feels pleasantly unstuck from the present. The cooking runs modern and Mediterranean, moving between seafood and meat with quiet confidence. The wine list leans Piedmontese but roams freely through Italy, France, and beyond, which is a good problem to have.

The old millstone and olive press are still in the dining room, left exactly where they were when this was a working oil mill. It's a restaurant now, all vaulted ceilings and rough stone walls in the hills of Colle di Val d'Elsa, with piazza tables in summer. The setting promises rustic simplicity, and the chef quietly ignores that promise, turning out dishes that are technically precise and a little unexpected, the kind of food that makes you put your fork down and reconsider.

A fourth-generation family trattoria in a small Lombardy town, Il Frate has been around forever and shows it in the best possible, unselfconscious way. The kitchen leans Emilian, heavy on the classics, and plates arrive generous and steaming. Giorgio runs the dining room with the ease of someone who grew up there, and the digital wine list runs to around 350 labels, weighted toward northern Italy.

A stone building with a garden terrace looking out over the Langhe hills, this is the kind of old-school Piedmontese restaurant where the tajarin arrives impossibly fine and dressed with Fassona beef ragu, and the dining room feels like it has been quietly perfecting the same traditions for generations. The kitchen treats the classics as a matter of principle, not nostalgia. Rooms are available in the village if you'd rather not drive back through the vineyards.

Terrace tables on a pedestrian square in the old town set the pace here, and it is slow by design. Il Giardino del Gusto is a cozy, classically decorated restaurant where the kitchen leans hard into Ligurian seafood but keeps a tasting menu devoted entirely to vegetables, which is either charming or quietly stealing the show. A few meat dishes round things out. The kind of dinner where lingering feels mandatory.

The open barbecue grill is the focal point of this cozy trattoria in a medieval hilltop village between Foligno and Perugia. Umbrian truffles and hyper-local produce run through the menu, with meat doing most of the talking, cooked over live fire in full view of the room. Guests staying the night in one of the comfortable rooms wake up to the same unhurried pace the valley has apparently maintained for centuries.

The setting is an Art Nouveau palazzo near Porta Nuova, with a bright main dining room, a romantic balcony, and a counter facing the open kitchen. It's a sit-down restaurant with a Mediterranean-leaning creative menu that moves between seafood and meat with equal comfort. The thick-cut Milanese veal cutlet, served with homemade ketchup, has the confidence of a place that knows its city's classics and isn't afraid to own one.

The Art Deco dining room feels like it belongs in a different city than the menu, which is stubbornly, cheerfully Roman. This osteria and bar is the Milanese outpost of a Rome original, with carbonara, gricia, and saltimbocca holding firm against any northern influence. The bar side reportedly stocks more than 600 amari, which is either a boast or a threat, depending on how the evening goes.

The terrace looks straight across to San Francesco church, which is a fine thing to have while eating tordelli lucchesi. This Lucchese trattoria sits in an old city laundry along the moat, and the room stays warm and convivial in the way that places do when nobody is performing. The menu runs on local specifics, tripe, bread pudding, and the stuffed pasta the town has made its own, paired with a wine list that takes its job seriously.

A modern bistro near Via XX Settembre where the menu changes with whatever looked good at the market that morning. The chef works squarely in Ligurian tradition, so expect the kind of cooking that has always belonged to this coast, potato cream with sea snails prepared Genoese-style, minestrone served in a small pot. The room is warm and informal, the sort of place where the daily specials are the real point.

The walk to your table threads through three hectares of Mediterranean park, which is the restaurant making its first argument before you've sat down. Il Mirto is a fine dining room inside Hotel Botania on Ischia, running vegetarian and vegan tasting menus built almost entirely from the property's own kitchen gardens. The service runs young and easy, which keeps the whole immersive-evening-in-nature premise from tipping into ceremony.

A family-run restaurant in Passignano's historic centre, right where the village pokes out into Lake Trasimeno, Il Molo has been around forever and leans hard into what the lake provides. Request a window table when you book and you'll eat fish pulled from the water you're looking at. The à la carte sits alongside tasting menus, and the kitchen moves between traditional Umbrian and something a little more contemporary without making a fuss about it.

A Mediterranean seafood restaurant tucked into an old alleyway where a noble palazzo's stables once stood, the stone-vaulted dining room feels like a secret the cathedral district kept to itself. Glass panels at the center of the floor reveal a cellar with over 300 labels, which gives you something to look at while you decide. The cooking leans into the ingredient rather than the technique, and the focaccia di mare has a reputation that precedes it.

Inside the Bulgari hotel, tucked into Milan's jewelry district, this fine dining room runs on a philosophy of substance over spectacle, with Niko Romito's name above the door and a rotating cast of trusted chefs keeping the kitchen steady. The menu moves between tasting courses and a proper à la carte, with risotto and vitello alla Milanese holding their ground among the more contemporary Italian dishes.

On the fifth floor of the Bulgari hotel, with a terrace overlooking the Mausoleum of Augustus, this fine dining room is where three-Michelin-star chef Niko Romito runs an outpost built around his signature idea: that classic Italian dishes get more interesting when you strip them back rather than build them up. Spaghetti al pomodoro, artichoke soup, saffron risotto, all treated with a kind of rigorous restraint. Stop at the bar on your way in and order something cold.

Inside the Zaha Hadid-designed Romeo hotel, just off Piazza del Popolo, this fine dining room is ebony walls, marble open kitchen, and the quiet confidence of a place that knows exactly what it is. Alain Ducasse's name is on the door, and the team trained in his Monaco and Paris kitchens shows it, turning high-quality Mediterranean ingredients into compositions that stay elegant without becoming architectural puzzles.

A handful of small dining rooms inside an 18th-century palazzo, each one dressed differently in its own fabrics and colors, give this contemporary Italian restaurant the feel of a very grand private home. The menu leans rich and considered, and a wooden dessert trolley making its rounds at the end of a meal is a genuinely old-fashioned touch. The wine list skews toward nearby Franciacorta, browsed on a tablet, which is the one concession to the current century.

Large windows that open onto the Rapallo promenade in summer set the tone at this seafood restaurant inside a small seafront hotel. The room is intimate and softly lit, the kind of place where the service is quiet and unhurried without being invisible. The kitchen lets the fish and seafood speak, keeping preparations clean enough that the ingredients do the persuading. A sensible choice when you want the Ligurian coast on a plate without a lot of theatre around it.

The wine bar vibe across the Arno in Oltrarno gives way to something that eats more like a proper trattoria: cured meats, ribollita, roast pigeon with beans, cantucci dunked in Vin Santo. The room is casual and convivial, the cooking faithful to Tuscan tradition with occasional nods to something more current. An old-school spot that locals treat like a standing appointment rather than a special occasion.

The veranda overlooks the port at Forio, and on a clear evening the sea views do most of the work before the food arrives. This is a regional seafood restaurant rooted in the cooking of Ischia and Campania, and the kitchen leans into that identity: pasta with the nearly extinct local zampognaro beans is the kind of dish that doesn't exist anywhere else. Rabbit served in terracotta is another house signature. Old-school in the best sense, without any of the fuss.

A tucked-away contemporary Italian restaurant near Palazzo Roccabruna, where the focus lands squarely on fish and seafood given modern treatment without abandoning the classics. The dining room was designed by the owners' father, which makes the whole sibling operation feel like a genuine family project rather than a concept. Raw fish dishes sit alongside something like a mango cheesecake, and somehow neither feels out of place.

A hillside estate with its own winery and a limonaia terrace ringed by citrus trees, which is either very romantic or a strong argument for moving to Tuscany permanently. This is a country-house restaurant doing classic Tuscan cooking with a careful eye, pairing ingredients from the surrounding sea and land with enough imagination to keep things interesting. Dress for the setting.

Terracotta walls, stone, and brick set the scene at this Dogliani trattoria, where Piedmontese cooking gets a lighter hand without losing its regional soul. The menu leans into local recipes, though the kitchen clearly enjoys a detour to the sea, with fish dishes that hold their own alongside the heartier fare. Informal service that somehow stays sharp, and the kind of room that feels lived-in without trying too hard.

Bitter notes are the kitchen's calling card at this contemporary restaurant in the Euganean Hills town of Este, where the chef builds dishes around vegetables and contrast rather than complexity for its own sake. Nothing hides behind a sauce or a garnish; the cooking is stripped back enough that each ingredient has to earn its place. The kind of room where you leave tasting something, not just eating it.

A restaurant inside the Salcheto Organic Winery, set in a farmhouse that has been quietly watching the hills around Montepulciano for centuries. The cooking is home-style Tuscan, grounded in the estate's own produce and small local suppliers, and guests sit at long shared Amiata oak tables that make the whole thing feel like a very civilized harvest lunch. In summer the outdoor tables open up, which makes the wine list feel less like an upsell and more like an obvious fact.

A young couple who cut their teeth at a well-regarded Alpine restaurant have opened their own place in Pergine, and the cooking leans into that same mountain-meets-modern register. The dining room feels deliberately contemporary, and the kitchen runs three tasting menus of different lengths, with dishes available à la carte from each. Expect creative, playful plates that treat Alpine ingredients as a starting point rather than a constraint.

A couple came home from time abroad, opened a small neighborhood restaurant on a quiet Milanese side street, and somehow made it feel like someone's well-run dining room. The menu shifts with the seasons and moves between gentle and bold without losing the thread. The owner works the floor with the ease of someone who knows the cellar cold and will steer you somewhere interesting without making a production of it.

The restaurant's name nods openly to the chef's long road from Albania to Piedmont, and the cooking carries that same self-awareness: rooted in Piemontese tradition but not precious about it. Fresh pasta, hazelnuts, truffles, and chocolate all show up without feeling like a Greatest Hits tour. The lunch menu runs lighter and easier on the wallet, though the kitchen will often let you wander into the fuller evening territory if you ask.

Exposed brick, bare wooden tables, and beams that look like they were left that way on purpose, because they were. This contemporary bistrot in the artisan-y Oltrarno neighborhood runs a menu that moves between meat, fish, and vegetarian without making a fuss about any of it, the kitchen finding its own lane rather than chasing Tuscan tradition. The crowd that fills those two rows of tables tends to know exactly what they came for.

A sixteenth-century wine press anchors the dining room of this contemporary Sicilian restaurant, set inside a relais at the foot of Mount Etna. The courtyard the building opens into makes the plain exterior feel like a small joke at the diner's expense. The kitchen leans on local vegetables and island ingredients, reworking traditional Sicilian flavors with a modern hand.

A seafood-forward restaurant near the Expo Fiera area with the kind of pressed-tablecloth formality that tells you the fish will be serious. The kitchen leans on classic Ligurian technique, so expect grilled whole fish, warm seafood salad, and fish braised with potatoes and Taggiasche olives rather than anything trying to surprise you. Meat exists on the menu, quietly, for the one person at the table who always orders it.

A trofie al pesto that the kitchen takes seriously enough to reimagine from scratch sets the tone at this intimate Ligurian fine-dining room tucked down a quiet side street in the Carignano quarter. Three tasting menus run from classic to vegetarian, but à la carte works too. The wine list leans into Ligurian labels, which makes sense here. The business lunch is a quietly generous deal that regulars have clearly already figured out.

A recently refurbished Japanese restaurant on Corso Lodi that now reads more like a sleek bistro than a sushi counter, which turns out to suit it. The menu runs through the classics, sashimi and uramaki and the like, alongside the kitchen's own creations and some Mediterranean-leaning detours. The wine list comes with a few sakes, overseen by a sommelier who has clearly done the homework.

Named for Naples' patron saint, whose relics rest in the Duomo around the corner, this trattoria treats Campanian cooking as an act of devotion. Polpo alla Luciana, broken ziti with ragù, baccalà with Neapolitan escarole: the menu reads like a greatest-hits of the city's culinary memory, with a handful of house originals alongside. A well-stocked deli at the entrance, loaded with salumi and cheese, sets expectations correctly from the start.

A modern restaurant tucked into a lively pedestrian lane near the Riviera di Chiaia, where the chef turns Campanian cooking into something a little more playful. The menu leans creative, with a tapas section that skips Spain entirely and reinterprets Italian and local classics in smaller format. The sommelier doubles as the DJ, which sounds gimmicky until the room actually hums along to it.

You reach it by following signs meant for the food shop next door, which sets the tone nicely. John Restaurant is a gourmet dining room in Afragola where the kitchen takes Campanian tradition as a starting point and then pulls it somewhere more personal, with each course tracing a loose thread back through the region's history. The wine list arrives on a tablet, which sounds gimmicky until you're actually scrolling through it.

A reinterpreted Santa Rosa dessert, flipped into a millefeuille with puff pastry, custard, and sour cherries, is a useful window into what this Campanian restaurant is doing inside an 18th-century villa on Herculaneum's storied Golden Mile. The kitchen leans into regional tradition and then quietly loosens it. In warmer months, a garden room opens for pizza. The wine cellar is deep enough to keep enthusiasts busy for a while.