The Best Places in Italy

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.

A cable-car ride, or a ski-in if you planned ahead, lands you at this lunch-only fine dining room perched above Corvara with floor-to-ceiling views of Sassongher and La Varella doing most of the decorating. The cooking is modern and quietly ambitious, pairing Alpine ingredients with fresh seafood in a way that feels pleasantly unexpected at altitude. Minimalist inside, maximalist outside.

An old farmstead in Albes where the family pivoted from growing produce to cooking it, and the kitchen still works almost entirely with organic, local ingredients. It's a sit-down restaurant with a contemporary Alpine menu: colorful plates, generous portions, and an all-female front-of-house team genuinely happy to walk you through the philosophy. There's also a small shop on the way out, which is dangerous if you arrived on an empty stomach.

The open kitchen sits dead center in the dining room, so you can watch the chef think. This is a small, creative restaurant in the South Tyrolean town of Vipiteno, where the cooking threads Italian and Alto Adige flavors through Asian technique with real conviction. His wife runs the floor with the kind of warmth that makes a modest room feel considered. A place where the food has clearly been thought about, not just assembled.

A kaiseki restaurant tucked just off Via Veneto, where the fish arrives so fresh the raw preparations almost make the case on their own. Kohaku brings Japanese haute cuisine to Rome with precise knife work and composed presentations, running from gyoza and tempura through to charcoal-grilled meats. An eight-course kaiseki menu is available at dinner for anyone who wants to hand the evening over entirely.

The table on the staircase books out weeks ahead, which tells you something about how Florence feels about this place. It's a modern Italian restaurant with an informal but polished room, and the kitchen runs tasting menus organized around land, sea, or garden alongside an à la carte menu. The cocktails get the same attention as the food, which is rare enough to mention.

An old farm with a hay barn in the South Tyrolean hills, converted into a cozy inn with a menu split right down the middle: traditional dishes on the left, modern and creative on the right. A mother and son run the kitchen together, each cooking in their own distinct way, and the menu names the producers behind most of what arrives at the table. Ordering from both sides is the obvious move, and apparently inspectors agreed.

A terrace suspended over the Bay of Naples, with sunsets that make conversation briefly impossible, sets the scene at this fine dining restaurant tucked inside a quiet hotel in Seiano, well away from the Amalfi Coast circus. The kitchen works through two tasting menus built from Campanian tradition, land and sea in confident rotation, with enough invention to feel modern without showing off about it.

Wooden panels and nautical fittings put you somewhere between a vintage fishing boat and a proper Italian seafood restaurant, which is exactly the spirit of L'Acciuga. The kitchen works from fresh catch and interprets it through a Romagnolo lens, with the anchovy spaghetti a good argument for staying put through dessert. The bar counter adds cocktails and kombucha to an otherwise serious wine list, because why not.

Parquet floors, wood beams, and exposed brick give this contemporary Italian restaurant a warmth that shifts from bright and airy at lunch to quietly romantic by evening. The menu moves between classic Italian recipes and more personal, chef-driven dishes, all leaning on quality seasonal ingredients. A small brick-vaulted wine cellar sits below, open to the curious, and an adjacent bar-bistro handles aperitivo hour with equal seriousness.

At Christmas, an ornate tree rises among mirrors, chandeliers, and stacked books in a room that treats maximalism as a design philosophy. This is a fine dining restaurant in the Mantuan countryside, where the kitchen draws on local tradition and, occasionally, the Renaissance. The signature dessert, a chocolate salami with warm zabaglione poured tableside from a copper pan, is reason enough to make the drive out to Quistello.

One wall here is carved straight into the cliff face, which sets the tone. This seafood restaurant in Monterosso al Mare climbs above the village on the salita dei Cappuccini, and the upper terrace has the kind of Ligurian coastline view that makes you forget to order. The menu changes daily by blackboard or by whatever the server recites, leaning heavily on the sea but never ignoring the land. Book the terrace; the walk up is short.

A sign on the wall reads "sacristy," which does lead to the wine cellar, so pack your patience. This old-school Abruzzese trattoria has been run by the same family forever, and the menu goes nowhere near the sea: cured meats, hand-cut chitarra pasta, porcini in season, and mutton stew are the point. The crème caramel gets a hit of local Navelli saffron, which is the kind of regional pride that actually makes you pay attention.

The menu is two pizzas: Margherita or Marinara, full stop. This old-school Neapolitan pizzeria has been running that same tight operation forever, issuing numbered tickets and calling diners in turn, which means you'll spend some time on a bench getting to know a stranger from somewhere else entirely. The room is loud and packed and not at all sorry about it. Come knowing your order, because the only real decision is whether you want garlic.

A trattoria-style restaurant in the Ferrara countryside where the menu leans hard into local tradition, white truffle taking over the room when the season allows. The owner doubles as a genuinely useful sommelier-without-the-pretension, steering you toward pairings you'd never have landed on alone. The cooking runs to rich, layered plates: passatelli in cheese fondue, pheasant with Castelmagno custard, the kind of food that makes the drive feel like a reasonable decision.

A trattoria on Ovada's main piazza that doubles as a wine boutique, so the Barolo list is organized by subzone the way serious shops do it. The menu is a tour of Piedmontese tradition: hand-rolled tajarin, beef braised in local wine, and the chocolate bunet that closes most meals in this part of the region. The finanziera, that old-fashioned offal stew almost nobody makes anymore, turns up occasionally if you're curious or brave.

The dining room sits inside the Albereta estate in Franciacorta wine country, all pale carpets and soft tones, with a quiet nod to Gualtiero Marchesi woven into the walls. This is a fine dining restaurant where the chef works a contemporary Italian register, leaning on the estate's own kitchen garden and local Bergamasque ingredients. The crowd dresses for it, and the pacing expects you to have nowhere else to be.

A hillside farmhouse just outside Lucca, with a terrace that fills up all summer long. Cristiano Tomei's creative restaurant runs on a blind tasting format where you pick the number of courses and then cheerfully lose track, which is rather the point. The kitchen has a signature obsession with bitter notes and Parmigiano Reggiano, often together, and the Bistecca Primitiva has its own devoted following.

Grilled fish and a view of the Ionian Sea from a table right on the Salento coast, which is about as direct a statement of intent as a seafood restaurant can make. The kitchen keeps things uncluttered: the best of the catch goes over the grill, while shellfish get preparations spare enough to stay out of their own way. It's a room that has no interest in cleverness, which, here, is exactly the point.

A French woman arrived in Chianti, fell in love with the food, and never left. That origin story explains the warm, slightly unusual energy of this rustic Tuscan restaurant tucked into a tiny hilltop village outside Castelnuovo Berardenga. Stone walls, old rural objects, and a room that feels genuinely lived-in frame a menu of traditional Sienese cooking, the kind where technique is unhurried and ingredients are handled with quiet, unfussy care.

A family spent a lifetime collecting the fabrics and furnishings that fill this restaurant, and it shows: the room feels curated rather than decorated, all soft lighting and genuine warmth in a restored hamlet tucked into the Valle Cervo. The cooking is rooted in Piedmontese ingredients with a careful modern hand. Beef Wellington turns up as a statement of precision in a place that otherwise feels like someone's very well-traveled home.

The dining room sits seven metres below sea level, which tells you something about where you are before the food does. This old-school trattoria in the Po delta has been in the same family for generations, and the kitchen leans hard into the estuary around it: eel roasted with white polenta, clam pasta, sole with fresh mayonnaise. The room feels like someone's grandmother never quite let go of it, and that's the whole point.

A restored farmhouse perched above Lake Garda, with a veranda so close to the water it feels like trespassing on a painting. This is a family-run contemporary Italian restaurant where the chef works the regional traditions and his brother handles a wine cellar of over 1,300 labels, kept in a frescoed room downstairs. A more casual osteria runs on the floor above, if the mood calls for it.

A late-19th-century farmhouse on the Calabrian coast road, stone walls and wooden ceilings inside, a sprawling terrace when the weather cooperates. The kitchen leans on the Ionian Sea for its menu, so fish and seafood do most of the talking, though meat shows up for those who ask. A shop next door sells regional products, including bergamot from the groves nearby, some of it made in-house.

A wisteria-shaded pergola on a farmhouse overlooking the Sarca valley sets the scene at this alpine trattoria in Drena. The kitchen runs on genuine regionalism: carne salada cured in-house, char from local waters, Trentino mushrooms, and red berries and chestnuts grown on the family's own land. It reads like a larder tour, except someone actually cooks it all with care.

A roadside trattoria on the way to Pordenone where the kitchen moves comfortably between land and sea, shifting from hearty meat dishes to seafood pasta without missing a beat. Lunch runs leaner, both in price and pace; dinner stretches out into a fuller affair. The brothers who run it keep things personal without letting them get sloppy, which is a harder balance to strike than it sounds.

Two chefs, one from Calabria and one from Puglia, run the kitchen at this contemporary restaurant on a working wine estate in the Valpantena hills. Their menu pulls ingredients from the south and the land around them, including mutton raised on site and housemade spaghetti with 'nduja and smoked ricotta. The wine list leans local, with Veneto labels alongside a handful of French bottles.

Frescoes on the walls, herbs from the kitchen garden on the plate: this is a formal restaurant inside a villa hotel in the Veneto countryside, with a fireplace for winter and a courtyard for summer. The young chef grew up cooking here, which shows in dishes built around vegetables and local producers. The wine list leans heavily into Riesling if that's your thing. A bistro handles the lighter, more casual lunch crowd next door.

An 18th-century farmhouse in the Alessandria countryside, stripped back to clean lines and pale walls inside, which makes a quietly dramatic frame for Piedmontese cooking with a modern lean. This is a proper sit-down restaurant, meat-forward and rooted in the region, with a chef who adds just enough of a twist to keep things interesting without losing the thread. The kind of place where the room itself feels considered, and the food follows suit.

Photographs of old locomotives and rows of copper pots line the walls of this long-running osteria in Pordenone's historic center. The kitchen leans hard into Friulian tradition, turning out cured meats, local cheeses, and braised beef cheek with polenta, the kind of food that arrives in portions sized for people who actually work. The room runs warm and convivial, the way an old neighborhood place does when it has nothing to prove.

A contemporary trattoria a short drive outside Crema, with a minimalist room lifted by pops of colour. The kitchen leans on Italian tradition, leaning further into modern technique as the week winds toward the weekend. The wine list splits evenly between Italian and French labels, with a serious run of champagnes for a room this unfussy. Weekday lunches are the quiet bargain the locals already know about.

The restaurant sits inside a wine estate, so the list leans hard on Barbaresco and Barolo, with Champagne as the only outside voice. La Gallina is a contemporary fine dining room with a rustic-elegant feel, the menu circling Piedmont and dipping into Liguria and the chef's native Campania. A dessert that arrives disguised as a cappuccino and focaccia breakfast suggests the kitchen has a sense of humor about where it draws its references.

The Josper oven and a dry-ageing unit on site tells you where this contemporary Italian restaurant's priorities lie. Grilled meats, including prized Iberian cuts, anchor the evening menu, while fish dishes keep things balanced. Lunch pulls back to something more casual and accessible without abandoning the kitchen's modern technique. The room itself has an architectural edge that matches the food, a short walk from the center of Foggia.

Tucked into the Villa Bardini museum complex above the city, this creative fine-dining restaurant earns its uphill walk with a summer terrace where you eat among herbs and greenery with Santa Croce floating in the distance. The chef works through Italian culinary tradition with genuine curiosity, leaning on sustainable sourcing for meat, bread, and pasta. Several menus are on offer, including a vegetarian option, which feels less like an afterthought here than most places.

A piano sits in the corner of what looks like a large glass veranda, and in summer the whole operation shifts outside to a terrace shaded by lemon trees. This contemporary restaurant in a quiet residential neighbourhood away from the centre builds its menu around fire and the grill, turning out personal, market-driven dishes that don't feel obligated to Piedmontese convention. The all-female front-of-house team runs things with easy, unforced warmth.

The dining room sits over the excavated remains of a Roman villa, which makes the bread service feel appropriately humble by comparison. This is a sit-down restaurant in central Assisi, split between straightforward Umbrian cooking and more considered modern plates. The wine cellar is serious enough to be a destination on its own, and the setting, ancient stone and all, does most of the interior decorating.

Castelfranco Emilia is tortellini country, and this modern Emilian restaurant leans into that with zero embarrassment. The chef grew up here, and the menu reads like a love letter to the region, fresh pasta folded by hand, bollito misto served with serious sauces. The dining room is contemporary without being cold, and the service runs warm enough that you don't notice how long you've been sitting there.

An old mill on the edge of Pietrasanta, with wood beams overhead and a terrace that earns its keep in summer, houses this modern Italian restaurant where seafood is the clear obsession. The chef works both sides of the pass, often taking orders tableside, and the raw seafood preparations are where the kitchen shows off, small bites that lean creative without tipping into gimmick. Meat dishes round out the menu for anyone who needs convincing.