The Best Places in Italy

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.

Tucked under the Procuratie Nuove arcades on Piazza San Marco, Caffè Florian has been around forever, and the gilded, frescoed rooms know it. It's a coffee and drinks bar where tourists come for the theater of the thing and locals duck in for a quick espresso at the counter, which costs considerably less than sitting down in the ornate dining rooms with the orchestra outside. Both options exist; just know which one you're paying for.

Bartenders in white tuxedos hand drinks to bellboys who carry them across one of the more theatrical lobby lounges in Venice, which is saying something. The Dandolo is a hotel bar in the Gothic palazzo next to the Doge's Palace, and the setting does most of the heavy lifting. Classic cocktails are reliably solid; the rest of the menu is less memorable. Come for the room, not the drinks list.

The black-and-white geometric mosaic walls do something clever with the glassware and smoked ceiling mirrors: the light never quite settles. This is the bar inside the Mandarin Oriental Milan, and it runs from espresso at eight in the morning all the way to a proper late night, organizing itself around aperitivo and the slower hours that follow. The outdoor sofas stay calm well into the evening before the room finds its louder gear.

Perched above a Replay store in Milan's gleaming Piazza Gae Aulenti, the Octavius Bar arrives as a nautical surprise, with boat-like design details in a neighbourhood that reads more glass tower than harbour. The cocktail bar draws the after-work crowd that lives in this part of the city, the kind of people who take their aperitivo seriously. Gae Aulenti is Milan's most self-consciously international square, which makes the whole thing feel pleasingly theatrical.

The name comes from the horticultural term for a cutting, a piece of a plant relocated to take root somewhere new, which tells you something about the ambitions here. Talea is an experimental cocktail bar tucked into a slightly unexpected corner of the Navigli area, with a room that feels deliberately intimate. The drinks lean on kitchen technique as much as bar technique, so what arrives in the glass tends to surprise before it satisfies.

The terrace hangs right over the Grand Canal, which is either romantic or deeply unfair depending on your budget. This hotel bar inside the Gritti Palace does the Grand Venetian thing without apology: etched mirrors, red marble floors, white-tie bartenders working through a long menu of classics. The crowd leans tourist, but the setting is so extravagant that nobody seems to mind being exactly where a postcard told them to be.

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.

The terrace hangs right over the Grand Canal, which is the whole argument for sitting here. This hotel bar at the Bauer does its job quietly, with black leather club chairs and scarlet walls they call the Red Room, though the interior is otherwise pretty modest by Venetian hotel-bar standards. Order something cold and watch the boats go by, which is exactly what everyone around you is doing.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves of wine and spirits line the walls of this canalside enoteca near Ponte San Trovaso, which works simultaneously as a wine shop, coffee stop, and cicchetti bar. The family runs the counter together, father and sons pouring by the glass while the food comes from behind a glass display case. A dozen or so wines open at a time, mostly from the Veneto, and bottles leave tucked under tourist arms at a reassuring clip.

A small cocktail bar with an industrial-meets-contemporary fit-out on a residential stretch between Porta Venezia and Piazzale Loreto, where boutique shops outnumber tourists. The team comes out of five-star luxury hotels, and it shows in the pacing and the polish, though the room itself is relaxed enough that nobody feels underdressed. Milanese regulars mix with the kind of international crowd that follows a good bartender from job to job.

Wine labels plaster the ceiling at this old-school Venetian wine bar tucked into a narrow alley near the Rialto, and the cellar below holds over a thousand bottles at prices that feel slightly illegal for Venice. Rough wooden benches, bare planks on the walls, and a glass counter piled with cicheti complete the picture. Locals have been doing exactly this, a glass and a small bite, here for generations.

A 15-meter bar counter lined with bamboo shelves stacked floor-to-ceiling with rum pretty much tells you everything. Rita's Tiki Room is a cocktail bar on Milan's canalside strip, serving Tiki classics and house originals alongside Polynesian snacks with a Cantonese edge. The same team behind Rita around the corner runs this one, and the vibe is full commitment: proper accoutrements, no ironic winking at the theme.

The sign is easy to miss, which seems to be part of the point. This cocktail bar in Porta Romana pulls you into a low-lit room of velvet sofas, extravagant mirrors, and sparkling lights that make it feel like the '80s never quite ended. The kind of place where you stop checking your phone without deciding to. A neighborhood worth wandering for its trattorias anyway, so the detour is painless.

A corner bacaro a short walk from San Marco, with shutters thrown open and barely a meter of corridor to stand in. The reason to know it is the hours: open until 1am most nights and 2am on Saturdays, long after Venice has gone to bed. Drinkers overflow onto the campo, voices carrying loudly enough to navigate by, which the neighbors have noted and the police occasionally confirm.

Surfboards and antique furniture share wall space at this cocktail bar on the far edge of Milan, and somehow the combination works. The room feels less like a city bar and more like a countryside detour, all mismatched art and skating decks, with a plant enthusiast behind the counter shaking what Italians have always called "misture." Five kilometers from the center, which is exactly far enough to feel like you've escaped something.