The Best Places in Italy

Carrù is the town that puts a fattened ox on a pedestal every winter, and this old-school trattoria leans into that identity hard. Piedmontese classics fill the menu: bagna cauda, boiled meats, ravioli, and a hazelnut cake that closes things quietly but well. Ask about the cellar, where a round table for ten in the "Crota dl'amicissia" turns dinner into an event. A Michelin Bib Gourmand, and a few guest rooms sit nearby if the bonet tips you over the edge.

A family trattoria tucked into the Modenese Apennines, where the parents cook and their daughter works the room. Mom handles the hand-rolled pasta and desserts, dad tends the meats, and the whole operation holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Truffle scent drifts through in season. The drive up from Modena on the SP3 takes an hour of switchbacks through green valleys, which regulars treat as part of the meal rather than a detour.

A seafood restaurant on the waterfront at Villa San Giovanni, where the second-floor terrace looks straight across the Strait of Messina toward Sicily. The fish comes off the grill simply, or arrives raw in preparations that lean more creative, and the kitchen holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Most visitors here are catching a ferry; the ones who know are booking a table instead.

A vaulted ceiling, an open kitchen, and a terrace beside the church of San Carlo Borromeo: the setting alone does a lot of the work. This modern restaurant in a small Apulian village cooks entirely from local ingredients, with herbs from its own kitchen garden. The chef spent formative years in Bologna, and the house-made stuffed pasta remembers that. A Michelin Bib Gourmand.

A grandmother built this family trattoria, her granddaughter now runs the kitchen, and her parents still work the dining room with the kind of attention that makes 1960s wallpaper feel like atmosphere rather than neglect. The menu is Monferrato through and through: vitello tonnato, hand-folded agnolotti, tajarin with porcini. The wine list follows the same logic. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and the prices stay honest enough to order a second carafe.

A four-hectare farm in the Cilento hills supplies most of what this artisan pastry shop turns into chocolate. The team grows their own ingredients, then sources obsessively for the rest, blending cacao into pralines perfumed with mountain oregano or wild violets steeped in cream. The panettone ferments in three stages and lands fragrant and barely sweet. Ranked among Italy's top praline makers by 50 Top Italy, which also named it Pastry Shop of the Year.

The design riffs on the 1950s golden age of Italian bar culture, and Cinquanta leans into it without tipping into kitsch. It's a cocktail bar in Pagani where an espresso at the counter is as welcome as a negroni with friends, and the staff seem to mean it. The specialty drinks menu rotates monthly, dusting off forgotten classics alongside more idiosyncratic combinations. Difford's Guide and The 50 Discovery have both taken notice.

Historic photographs of the original café guided the renovation, so the room feels like a Florentine institution that quietly relocated across the street and pretended nothing happened. Giacosa 1815 opens as a coffee-and-pastry spot, then pivots to aperitivo as the evening arrives. The Negroni is practically mandatory, given the history, but the cocktail list keeps going for those who feel like exploring past the obvious.

Bucatini all'amatriciana is the reason to come, and 50 Top Italy named theirs the finest in Rome. Il Matriciano is a proper trattoria in Prati, the kind where old regulars never open the menu and the waiters wear what appear to be period costumes. The room is dressed-up bourgeois, the service formal but warm, and the pasta arrives on fine porcelain exactly as it should, sauce clinging, guanciale doing the heavy lifting.

The wine cellar doubles as the breakfast room each morning, which tells you something about how this Sicilian countryside restaurant orders its priorities. Surrounded by olive groves outside Noto, it serves a spread of house-baked pastries and local products, with eggs and fresh juices available to order. 50 Top Italy named it the country's top breakfast, and sitting in the garden with the light coming slow over the valley, it's easy to see why.

The sandwich here starts with bread baked fresh that day, then gets filled with Calabrian sausage, 'nduja, Tropea onions, or caciocavallo from the Sila plateau, depending on your mood. It's a fast-casual spot built around showcasing small local producers, which sounds like a pitch deck but eats like lunch. The formula has been spreading to other Italian cities, and 50 Top Italy ranked it first among the country's sandwiches.

Fresh fish lands each evening, and the room around it in Monterusciello, just off the Naples ring road, is something: floor-to-ceiling wine racks, warm light, and the smell of the sea before you've ordered a thing. Punto Nave is a seafood restaurant that runs the full register, from raw crudi to the catch of the day, with oysters, lobster, and white caviar for those who want to push it. It holds the top spot on 50 Top Italy's best fish restaurants list.

The toilet is famously larger than the bar, which seats four people at a counter and leaves no room for ambiguity about what kind of night you're having. Backdoor 43 is a reservation-only cocktail bar tucked behind another bar on the Navigli, and the bartender on duty is working exclusively for you. Guests pick the music, the pace, and apparently the vibe. Very small, very Milan.

Two rooftop pools and a cocktail bar on the fourth floor of a building in Milan's Porta Garibaldi district set the scene here: the kind of place that decided glamour and a proper dinner weren't mutually exclusive. Brass, marble, and vintage wood fill the interior while the terraces open onto skyscraper views. The kitchen keeps the Italian menu light and seasonal, and the cocktails have become a standard reference point for the city.

The cocktail bar that decided pizza was the obvious food pairing, back when that was a radical idea in Milan. Dry is a lively, sociable spot on Via Solferino where the drinks are serious and the tables are meant to be shared, sometimes with strangers who are perfectly happy to share them. The room runs warm and international, the kind of place where arriving alone rarely stays that way for long.

Six hundred year old columns greet you in the lobby of this hotel, housed in a Renaissance palazzo a short walk from the Trevi Fountain. The team kept the bones intact, so cocciopesto plaster, Travertine stone, and a monumental marble staircase do most of the decorating. It's the kind of place that makes you feel like a guest of the building as much as the brand, which is a neat trick for a wellness hotel group.

Art nouveau bones, a courtyard that feels borrowed from a film set, and the kind of slightly faded glamour that no interior designer can fake. Hotel Locarno is a historic Rome property steps from the Piazza del Popolo, and it still carries the bohemian mood that drew Fellini and his crowd decades ago. The current owner inherited it from family and has kept it exactly as it should be: atmospheric, a little theatrical, and blessedly unmodernized.

A Roman trattoria steps from the Pantheon that has never once been tempted to put a Caesar salad on the menu. The Gargioli family has been feeding the neighborhood for generations with the unapologetic classics: oxtail braised in tomato and celery, fettuccine with chicken innards, artichokes in the cooler months. The wine list is a serious one, and the ricotta and strawberry jam pie is the kind of dessert that makes you forget you had a plan after lunch.

The pizza ebraica here is not pizza at all but a dense, sticky fruit cake built on almond flour with raisins, nuts, and candied fruit, and it will absolutely wreck your shirt. This old-school bakery in the former Jewish ghetto has been around forever, turning out that signature loaf alongside cinnamon-heavy biscotti and amaretti thick with whole almonds. Find a bench nearby before you start eating, or accept the consequences.

L'Elementare is a casual Roman pizzeria, the thin, crackly-edged kind that arrives fast and costs less than the cocktail you'll have afterward. The crust splits the difference between airy and cracker, and the supplì include one stuffed with 'ndjua and fior di latte, which makes the fried starter the one you'll argue about. The Trastevere location sits next to a row of bars, so you can eat well and then watch everyone else try to.

Testaccio's covered market is the kind of place where serious Roman cooks still do their weekly shop, which is your best clue about the quality of what's on offer. Come morning to catch it in full swing before the 2 p.m. close. Standouts include Mordi e Vai for generational offal sandwiches, Da Artenio for pizza slices, and Da Corrado for natural wines and meatballs worth the detour.

Piatto Romano is a Roman trattoria in Testaccio, the neighborhood that more or less invented the city's cooking, which is why the menu leans hard on offal and the daily specials rarely leave anyone guessing. It suits a slow weekday lunch or a quiet dinner in the freshly redone dining room. Yes, there's salad, and it's fine, but the bitter genziana digestivo at the end is the part that tells you where you are.

A pizzeria where you can order a single slice à la carte or surrender to a tasting flight of four to six courses, each a different style of pizza served in sequence. The wine cellar is the quietly absurd part: a selection of bottles and champagnes that would embarrass most fine-dining rooms. Classic pies sit alongside fried and baked options, and the dough holds up its end. Ranked first on 50 Top Pizza Italy.

A three-flour dough blend with long fermentation is the organizing principle at this polished Neapolitan pizza spot in Chiaia, where the crust arrives light and airy in a way that makes you rethink what you thought you knew about pizza. The room is bright and carefully put together, with an outdoor terrace that fits the neighborhood's self-regard. The montanarine are worth the detour on their own, and the wine and craft beer list has been thought through with similar care.

The signature move here is the "sott'engopp," a pizza built in reverse: sauce, cheese, and toppings go down first, and the fried base is laid on top at the table. This is a Neapolitan pizzeria in the Sanità neighborhood, colorful plates and all, where the dough is light enough that you'll find yourself rationalizing a second pie. The drink list is taken seriously, and the service keeps pace.

The smell of baked pastry hits you at the door, but the charcoal grill is what this place is about. It's a lively trattoria-style restaurant in a small Veneto town where prime cuts are the main event, cooked over embers with obvious conviction. The menu nods to season and tradition while slipping in the occasional contemporary detour, and Wednesdays bring a short run of gourmet pizzas that feels less like a gimmick than it sounds.

A French-leaning pastry shop run by an Italian chef whose heart landed somewhere between Paris and Lyon. The chocolate work is the draw, with single-origin bars appearing in multiple textures across a single slice. The tiramisù ranks among Italy's finest by 50 Top Italy's count. Jar-baked leavened desserts, including panettone and babà, fill out the counter for anyone who thought they'd only stop in for coffee.

A pastry counter on Via Toledo that runs continuous production of sfogliatelle and babà so there's always something coming out warm. The point is freshness, and regulars know it: you grab one to eat while walking back from Piazza del Plebiscito, not to save for later. The babà ranks among the top ten in the country on the 50 Top Italy list. Caprese cakes and cassate fill out the case for anyone who needs a second reason to stop.

Francesco Martucci's pizzeria in Caserta reads less like a pizza shop and more like a research lab that happens to have a wood oven. The dough is studied for acidity and thermal contrast, the toppings pull from Campania's pantry and beyond, and the result lands somewhere between a neighborhood staple and fine dining. Ranked second in all of Italy by 50 Top Pizza, it draws the kind of pilgrims who book before they book a hotel.

White tablecloths and a bright room in the Trionfale neighborhood, where a trattoria built around Roman classics draws the kind of crowd that actually knows its guanciale. The team behind it includes a chef with serious fine-dining credentials, which explains why the cacio e pepe and amatriciana feel familiar and yet somehow sharper than you expected. The wine list rewards attention, and the service keeps a pace that doesn't make you feel processed.

A sprawling osteria on the Pozzuoli waterfront that covers a lot of ground, a proper sit-down dining room in shades of green and blue, a wine bar for a casual glass, a garden with lake views, and a shop downstairs selling provisions. The kitchen moves between fried snacks, fish, meat, and traditional pasta nudged toward something more contemporary. The wine list, built over decades of obsessive travel, runs deep and stays reasonably priced.

A pastry shop in the heart of a small Campanian town, recently renovated so the display cases now run low and horizontal, letting the cakes and chocolates present themselves properly. The range runs from classic leavened pastries to pralines and semifreddi with chocolate bases, and the Black Forest cake has its devotees. It ranked among 50 Top Italy's best chocolate desserts, if that helps narrow things down.

The spleen sandwich alone has been drawing the brave and the curious to this old-school Palermo institution for longer than anyone working there can remember. It's a casual street food shop in the Kalsa district, with outdoor tables facing the Gothic facade of San Francesco church, serving arancine, panelle, caponata, and cannoli to anyone who bothers to show up. The menu is a short course in what Palermo actually eats.

A plant-only restaurant in Turin where the chef works closely with Piedmontese farmers and lets the season dictate everything, right down to the birch sap in the drinks. The open kitchen keeps the small dining room lively, and the wine list moves comfortably between Champagne and natural bottles. Nothing on the plate comes from an animal, but the cooking is anything but austere.

The babà here landed at number five on 50 Top Italy's ranking of the best in the country, which is a serious thing to say about a single pastry. This is a neighborhood pasticceria in Pollena Trocchia where the chef trained across Italy and France before coming home, and the French pastry tradition shows in the decor as much as the technique. Sfogliatelle and choux fill the case alongside the classics.

Carved into the slope of Monte Testaccio, a hill built from ancient broken amphorae, this old-school Roman trattoria has been feeding the neighborhood on quinto quarto, the offal cuts that Testaccio made its own, for what feels like forever. The wine cellar runs deep and the service carries the quiet confidence of six generations. The bucatini all'amatriciana, ranked among Italy's finest, arrives with extra pecorino on the side, unprompted, as it should.

A seafood restaurant perched inside the Regional Park of Monte Conero, with big windows and tables angled so the Adriatic does most of the decorating. The kitchen builds each year's menu around a single theme, creative dishes with a careful hand. You can graze on a couple of street-food bites at lunch or commit to the full dinner menu. When it's warm enough, the outside tables fill up, blankets included for when the wind disagrees.

Raw seafood and Champagne behind the port, in the courtyard of a sixteenth-century palace, is a combination that Trani somehow keeps to itself. This is a seafood restaurant with a nautical bistro feel, where the kitchen keeps its hands light and lets the fish do the talking. Locals fill the tables, always a useful sign. The raw plates are a reason to linger, and the southern-style pasta courses follow naturally.

A pastry shop in the Monteverde quarter where single-portion cakes have quietly become the whole point. The team turns out both old-school classics, like sacher and apricot tart, and contemporary creations that regulars now order without looking up. Breakfast pastries run from croissants to krapfen to pain au chocolat, and there's a savory counter and made-to-order cakes for good measure. It ranked seventh on 50 Top Italy's chocolate dessert list.

A large fireplace anchors the dining room of this vegetable-forward restaurant set inside a rural villa on the Murgia plateau, where warm wood and old stone set the mood before the food says anything. The seven-course tasting menu shifts with the weather and the season, built around vegetables and wild herbs cooked quickly enough to stay themselves. The wine list leans toward natural and biodynamic producers from the region. Ranked third among Italy's vegetable bistros by 50 Top Italy.

A butcher shop that never quite stopped being one, Da Gigione Gourmand in Pomigliano d'Arco has grown into a sit-down restaurant where the sandwich is still the main event. The family behind it built a following on aged, carefully sourced cuts and fillings that take the format seriously, backed by a solid list of wines and craft beers. It ranked second on 50 Top Italy's Best Sandwiches list, which tells you where the priorities lie.

A Roman osteria a block from the Parliament building that somehow never became a tourist trap, even though it could have. The carbonara is famous enough to rank among Italy's top five, loaded with crispy guanciale, silky egg cream, and enough black pepper to mean business. Roman classics like saltimbocca and abbacchio fill out a menu that regulars navigate without looking. Eat outside in the little alley when the weather plays along.

Perched above the port of Anzio, this old-school seafood restaurant has been running on family tradition and whatever came off the boats that morning for longer than most regulars can remember. The raw platter arrives with just oil and salt, which is either confidence or a dare. A deep wine list leans toward natural producers. It ranks fourth on the 50 Top Italy fish restaurant list, which should tell you something about the queue for a table.

A neighborhood provisions shop that never quite decided whether it wanted to be a deli or a trattoria, so it became both. Shelves of organic cheeses, oils, and cured meats share the room with about ten tables where regulars eat cooked dishes and serious sandwiches. Everything points back to Sicily, and the family running it clearly knows the producers behind every jar on the shelf.

A bakery a short walk from Napoli Centrale that's been pulling sfogliatelle from the oven since before your grandparents were born, in both the flaky riccia and the crumbly frolla. The shells crack open to a perfumed, creamy filling, and the place operates at a pace that suggests demand has never once slackened. Ranked second on 50 Top Italy's sfogliatelle list. Leave with a cartoccio wrapped in blue and white paper or don't bother claiming you visited Naples.

A pastry shop in the Piedmontese countryside where the display case runs from classic regional sweets to chocolate work, confections, gelato, and leavened breads, covering most of the dessert canon in a single stop. The spoon desserts are the quiet argument for making the drive, and the tiramisù, ranked among Italy's finest, lands light in texture but deep in flavor. Bonet, done properly, also shows up to make the case.

The menu calls it a "non-amatriciana," and that framing tells you everything about this Prati restaurant. Shallots cooked down to almost nothing and a touch of balsamic vinegar stand in for the usual guanciale swagger, and it works. The room runs Nordic-minimal, the team runs tight, and the cooking looks outward while keeping one foot in Rome. Fase lands at number eight on 50 Top Italy's Best Amatriciana list, which for a rule-breaking version is a pointed result.

The oyster plateau arrives in three sizes and reads like a passport, with Italian, French, and Irish varieties arranged by origin. This is a seafood restaurant near San Siro, elegant enough to dress for, where the menu moves from raw shellfish to fire, the chef notably skilled on the grill. The tuna belly saltimbocca gives you a sense of how tradition gets handled here: with a light hand and a clear point of view.

Soft buns stuffed with ingredients sourced almost entirely from Sicilian small producers, this sandwich shop on Piazza Olivella has been running the same game for a while and shows no signs of losing the room. The fillings read like a tour of the island's niche farms: Nebrodi black pork, Sciacca anchovies, Modica chicken. Fresh potato chips on the side, natural wines and craft beers to wash it down.

Via Margutta has been an artists' haunt since forever, and this vegetarian restaurant fits the neighborhood's slightly romantic self-image without being precious about it. The menu is wide enough that committed carnivores rarely feel ambushed, with tasting menus and à la carte options, and the desserts tend to be the thing people mention unprompted. Spagna metro is steps away, making it easier to justify the second glass from a genuinely considered wine list.

A sushi restaurant in Perugia that also runs a traditional Japanese menu, and does both with the kind of unhurried seriousness you don't expect this far from the coast. The room is relaxed and welcoming, and the presentation is careful without being fussy. Prices sit above what the region usually asks, but the sourcing explains most of it. It landed at number eight on 50 Top Italy's sushi list, which for Umbria is a fairly extraordinary thing to be able to say.

Orders go through a window cut into the wall, which tells you everything about the format before you've even looked at the menu. Katsusanderia is a Japanese street food counter in Milan serving sando on housemade bread, rice bowls, and sides like potato salad and eggplant in sesame sauce. The drinks run to Japanese beer and sake, nothing fussier. It's a long way from the all-you-can-eat circuit, and the sandwiches are substantial enough that you won't need a second lunch.

A sushi and fusion restaurant in the old heart of Turin where the menu runs on the motto "Taste different," which it seems to mean. The kitchen bends Japanese technique toward Sicilian instincts and the occasional French flourish, cold green-tea noodles sharing the menu with wagyu ham and butter-seared scallop. It ranked sixth on 50 Top Italy's sushi list, for whatever direction you need pointing.

A proper sushi bar counter greets you at the door in the San Lorenzo neighborhood, the kind where the staff will walk you through the menu without making you feel like a tourist in your own dinner. The room keeps things spare, a nod to Japanese minimalism without the full performance of it. Fresh fish, simply handled, drives everything here, with salmon worth noting in particular. A small, considered wine list rounds things out.

A seafood restaurant in Porto Cesareo where the menu follows the catch rather than the calendar, and a raw platter arrives before you've quite settled in. The chef runs the room with her daughters and a staff that's polished without being stiff. Homemade bread and a quiet reverence for olive oil set the tone early. Ranked seventh on Italy's 50 Top Fish Restaurants list, if that helps you decide.

A Roman trattoria that has been holding down Campo de' Fiori since forever, right across from the statue of Giordano Bruno, while the tourist traps around it come and go. The menu runs through the Roman classics, and the carbonara is the reason to sit down, made with the kind of ingredient obsession that separates a real kitchen from a souvenir experience. A serious wine cellar rounds things out.

A tiny vegetable bistro tucked into the old center of Catania, where you pick your meal at the counter by choosing how many courses you want rather than what you want, since the menu changes with whatever came in that morning. Tables spill onto the street, the kitchen is open, and the whole thing runs on seasonal produce leaning vegan, with a short list of local natural wines to round it out.

Gluten-free, fully vegan, and somehow not the least bit preachy about either, Linfa is a plant-based restaurant in Milan where soft colors, scattered greenery, and a lounge vibe make the room feel more like somewhere you'd linger than somewhere you'd atone. The menu swings from pasta to sushi to a vegetable riff on a flambéed steak, which is the kind of range that keeps skeptics at the table. An eight-course tasting menu runs alongside à la carte.

A craft beer bar and meat-skewer spot on Piazza Cairoli that was pairing local brews with quality cuts before it became anyone's idea of a concept. The menu runs well beyond burgers into pork, chicken, and other skewered things, with a beer list long enough to require some help from the genuinely enthusiastic staff. It looks like a pub from the outside, which keeps expectations honest and the room easy.

A stuffed pepper is apparently the highest praise in Naples, and locals use one as a nickname for this trattoria a block from the central station. The kitchen has been around forever defending Neapolitan tradition while slipping in the odd bao filled with slow-cooked genovese, which is either heresy or confidence depending on who you ask. Pilgrims and regulars share the same tables, drawn by eggplant parmigiana and a babà that closes the argument.

A family osteria in Monteverde Vecchio whose roots trace back to Amatrice, which means the amatriciana here carries the weight of hometown pride. The Rocchi family sources from small regional producers they know personally, and the wine list moves. 50 Top Italy ranked their amatriciana second in all of Italy, which is the kind of credential that makes you order it before you've even sat down properly.

A pastry shop facing Amalfi's cathedral square, its liberty-style windows trimmed with the blues, greens, and yellows of local ceramics. The sfogliatelle, both the ridged ricce and the short-crust frolle, are filled with candied citrus that scents the whole thing without taking over. The candied orange and lemon peels dipped in chocolate are hard to walk past. Ranked sixth among Italy's sfogliatelle, if that helps you decide how many to order.

A pastry shop in Forio that locals and summer visitors have been stopping into for generations, Pasticceria F.lli Calise is best known for its cornetto ischitano, a brioche-meets-puff-pastry hybrid that is essentially the island's calling card. The babà here, ranked among Italy's finest by 50 Top Italy, is well-risen, pillowy, and soaked in fragrant syrup. A Mediterranean garden out back makes lingering over a coffee feel less like a detour and more like the whole plan.