The Best Places to Eat and Stay in Italy

A chalet fireplace that smells of woodsmoke in a village so small you'll question your GPS twice sets the scene for this traditional Italian osteria. The kitchen follows the mountain calendar closely, moving from wild herbs in spring to woodland fruits in autumn. One tasting menu, booked at least two days ahead, which is either charming or inconvenient depending on your travel style.

A table for two on a small terrace right at the canal is the opening argument here. This elegant trattoria in San Polo keeps its cooking rooted in Venice, which in season means fried moleche, the soft-shell crabs that appear briefly and disappear before you've planned a second trip. The wine cellar runs to around 800 labels, with a grappa and cognac selection that suggests nobody is in a hurry to leave.

Rothia, a white wine custard dusted with cinnamon and spiced bread, is as good a reason as any to end a meal here. This old-school osteria in the historic center has been turning out Valdostan classics forever: cured meats with fontina, polenta, fondue in its various forms. The wine list leans heavily local, with well over a hundred Aosta Valley labels, many poured by the glass.

The name comes from an old-school tradition of selling wine for 36 cents a litre, and the spirit of that transaction, good things at fair prices, still seems to be the point. This Parma osteria serves Emilian classics with the occasional contemporary detour, and the wine list is the kind that someone clearly thought hard about, built to move alongside the food rather than show off beside it.

A 16th-century dining room with a fireplace sets the tone at this Tuscan osteria in the hill town of Cortona, where the cooking stays close to local tradition and whatever the season is offering. Theatrical decor runs through every room, from the formal to the trattoria-style. A small terrace looks onto the pedestrian street, and the few tables out there go fast, so book ahead if eating outdoors matters to you.

Books and wine bottles share the walls with old photos at this intimate bistro tucked into a quiet corner of Ravenna's historic centre. Tables are small and close together, the lighting is low, and the whole thing has an almost Parisian feel that feels slightly unlikely this deep into Emilia-Romagna. The menu runs contemporary Italian, the wine list strays into the rest of Europe, and you should book ahead, because the room fills fast.

Vine-covered pergola in summer, warm low-lit room the rest of the year, this is an old-school osteria in the Langhe hills outside Barbaresco. The kitchen cooks Piedmontese home recipes to order, the kind passed down rather than invented, and the spinach frittata is the sort of dish that looks modest until you understand what modest can mean here. The wine list leans local and stays reasonable, which in this corner of Piedmont is its own small miracle.

The red house at Kaberlaba holds two restaurants, and this is the more relaxed one, where the kitchen turns toward Veneto classics like baccalà alla vicentina and tripe. It shares a roof with a Michelin-starred sibling, so the odd crossover dish appears on the menu. The carbonara, made with local ingredients, has developed its own following. An osteria in the old sense: proper food, full flavors, no need to dress up.

Tables overlooking Piazza Grande and the Loggia Vasariana set the scene at this contemporary Italian restaurant, where the kitchen leans into seasonal cooking with real technique. Pigeon appears in multiple cuts, each handled differently, paired with sweet onion and cocoa nibs. The front-of-house team knows the wine list deeply and will talk you through it at length, which, in Arezzo, is exactly the kind of evening you came for.

A stone passageway in a mountain village is an unlikely place to find a kitchen working this carefully, yet here it is. Osteria Il Bagatto is a small, intimate gourmet restaurant where the menu shifts with the seasons and leans into the Alps without becoming a greatest-hits of local clichés. The wine list is short but pulls real bottles, and the chef clearly knows what to do with sweetbreads.

Osteria il Moro sits along Trapani's main thoroughfare with a terrace for watching the town go by. It's a contemporary Sicilian restaurant where the kitchen leans hard on the sea but makes room for a braised cheek dish finished with a centuries-old chocolate sauce that sounds wrong and tastes like the point of the whole trip. The wine list keeps things regional without feeling provincial. Dressier than a trattoria, less formal than you'd expect for cooking this considered.

Tasting menus named after places, built around ingredients that change with the season, served at just a handful of tables in a warmly lit room in Tolentino. The chef came from Albania and spent years absorbing Italian culinary tradition, and the cooking sits at that interesting crossroads, contemporary but grounded. Book ahead, because the room fills fast and walking in is optimistic thinking.

A bright, spacious dining room in the center of Seregno, where the mood manages to feel both convivial and discreet, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. This is a contemporary Italian osteria with a serious approach to ingredients and a wine list that earns its own conversation. The chef trained under a noted Lombardian hand, and the tasting menu reflects that pedigree without making you feel like you're sitting an exam.

A terrace just off the tourist drag in Stresa's historic center sets the tone for this contemporary Italian restaurant: relaxed but considered, and clearly not here to sell you a postcard. The kitchen moves between land and sea with some ease, pulling from local producers and letting the ingredients do the talking. Ravioli stuffed with farmyard meats sits comfortably beside octopus in saffron broth, and neither dish feels out of place.

The blackboard changes daily, which is the point. This welcoming Palermo trattoria runs on Sicilian seafood, the kind that reads the morning's catch and builds around it. Local tradition anchors the menu, but the kitchen stays light on its feet, and the house caciucco, a fragrant broth packed with John Dory, scorpionfish, sea bass, prawns, and squid, makes a case for both at once. Leave room for the deconstructed cannolo.

Vegetables grown a few kilometers away in the family's garden end up on your plate the same day, which sets the tone for everything at this cozy Apulian restaurant on Corso Cavour. The kitchen works through tasting menus and à la carte, reinterpreting regional traditions without losing sight of where it is. Service runs warm and precise, the kind that anticipates without hovering. A good spot for a long, unhurried lunch in Ostuni.

A small, intimate osteria tucked into the historic center of Zagarolo, where the cooking starts with Lazio pantry staples and then quietly wanders elsewhere, pulling in ingredients that have no obvious business being this close to Rome. The menu reads local until it doesn't. The terrace is worth requesting in good weather, and the room is small enough that booking ahead is less a suggestion than a fact of life.

An old-school osteria just outside Masone that sat dark for years before two young chefs decided to bring it back, cooking the border country where Liguria tips into Piedmont. The room feels pleasantly contemporary without forgetting what the building is, and the kitchen does the same, taking regional recipes and pressing them forward with technique that earns its keep. A Michelin Selected Restaurant.

A small Art Nouveau villa in the Tuscan countryside sets an unexpectedly polished stage for a modern osteria with old roots. The menu leans heavily on meat, with Tuscan tradition doing most of the heavy lifting, and when hunting season rolls around, the game dishes shift things into a more contemporary register. A courtyard garden out back handles the warm-weather overflow. The wine list sneaks in a few French bottles, which feels almost rebellious given the address.

Salt cod gets its own tasting menu here, which tells you something about how seriously the Murani brothers take Apulian tradition. This is a warm, unfussy osteria east of Foggia's centre, where the kitchen runs on seasonal produce, some of it from their own garden, and on family recipes that feel like they were cooked for you specifically. The wine list is all regional, and the room is bright enough to make the food look good before you've even tasted it.

A handsome old palazzo in Noceto's center, right at the edge of Emilia-Romagna's legendary food belt, now runs as a multi-floor dining destination with a bar and bistro on the ground level and a more formal gourmet room upstairs. The tasting menus lean creative and contemporary, with à la carte available alongside a serious wine list. The kind of place where the building does half the work, and the kitchen seems to know it.

Parma is prosciutto country, so a restaurant that splits its attention evenly between land and sea is a quiet act of defiance. Parizzi is a comfortable, colourful dining room on a central street, serving contemporary takes on the local canon alongside a proper seafood side of the menu. The kitchen leans on good sourcing and clean technique over flourish, which in this part of Italy is basically a philosophical statement.

A young chef shaped by home cooking and a stretch in French kitchens runs this intimate contemporary restaurant in the middle of town. Lunch keeps things relaxed and affordable; evenings open into a more personal à la carte where land and sea dishes show off what the training was actually for. A carefully chosen natural wine list runs alongside, coherent rather than showy.

Named after the chef's mother, this tasting-menu restaurant in central Modena shifts its lighting, music, and room details in step with the menu as the seasons turn, which is either charming or a lot, depending on your tolerance for concept dining. The kitchen draws on a wide spread of references and cultures without any apparent anxiety about what goes with what. Counter seating puts the young team's storytelling right in front of you.

You can walk in straight from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, which sets the tone immediately. This is the Park Hyatt's intimate fine dining restaurant, with contemporary art on the walls and service that knows exactly what it's doing. The kitchen runs two tasting menus, one a quiet love letter to Milan, the other following the season wherever it leads. The sommelier commands around 700 labels and seems genuinely happy to talk you through them.

Three separate tasting menus, one each for meat, fish, and vegetables, give away what kind of dinner this is: a modern restaurant where the kitchen is the whole point. The room in Fasano is warm and convivial, the cooking precise and sensory-minded, and the story behind it, started by the chef and his partner after years in Australia, gives the place an unusually wide-angle outlook for a small Apulian town.

A small, modern seafood restaurant on the western shore of Lake Bolsena, where the terrace puts you close enough to the water to feel the logic of eating fish here. The menu leans almost entirely toward the sea, which takes a little faith this far inland, but the kitchen commits to it. You can follow a themed tasting menu or pick your way through the carte, choosing at least two dishes and letting the quiet, unhurried service do the rest.

A fishmonger that gradually started feeding people, Pesceria San Martino is a small, unpretentious seafood restaurant in Ciriè where the front room is intimate and a glass conservatory opens to the garden in summer. The kitchen leans into what you'd expect from its origins: very fresh fish, fried squid available to take away, and a "seafood charcuterie" that earns its quotation marks. Weekends fill fast, so book ahead.

Maccheroni alla bobbiese, the pasta shape that put this small Emilian hill town on the culinary map, is what the kitchen here has built its reputation on. It's a traditional trattoria-style restaurant near Bobbio's historic centre, cooking squarely from the local pantry and the season, not the trend. The room feels like a place where the menu changes when the produce does, not when the PR department does.

A handful of tables in a spare modern room with a nod to 1920s detailing, near the edge of Treviso's old center. The name is a riff on tailoring, and the kitchen takes the metaphor seriously, building the menu around whatever the market offers and shaping it into three tasting menus that prioritize flavor over flourish. A business lunch lands at midday for those who prefer not to commit to the full fitting.

A family-run Piedmontese restaurant in Borgomanero where the dining room has quietly ignored every décor trend of the last several decades and is better for it. The cooking is classic, with the occasional modern adjustment, like their paniscia, the local bean-and-salami risotto, finished with a swoosh of vegetable cream on top. A few fish dishes round out a menu that otherwise stays firmly in the region.

A short walk from Piazza Navona in a city where proximity to a landmark usually means a tourist tax, this seafood restaurant holds its own with a menu built around crudo and whatever the day's catch makes possible. The room is modern and intimate, service reads your mood without hovering, and the team brings real experience to Rome's notoriously competitive dining scene. Go when the evening quiets the neighborhood down.

Just past Porta Romana, this small contemporary dining room keeps so few covers that booking ahead isn't optional. Rustic details share the room with generous floral arrangements, which gives the place more personality than its size suggests. A portion of the produce comes from the team's own farm of the same name, and the menu moves between meat and fish in a way that feels considered rather than arbitrary.

Terracotta floors, exposed brick, and shelves of bottles stacked floor to ceiling set the scene at this farmhouse restaurant outside Pontassieve. The menu moves between charcuterie, classic Tuscan meat dishes, and a few seafood options that keep things from feeling predictable. The wine list leans toward bottles that are considered rather than expensive, which is its own kind of statement in a region where the opposite is easy.

A nineteenth-century farmhouse on the quiet edge of Empoli, restored just enough to keep the rural bones showing. This is a contemporary Tuscan restaurant where the kitchen takes local, seasonal ingredients seriously without turning dinner into a lecture. The chef's pigeon dish, exploring the bird across five preparations, is the kind of thing that makes you glad you asked for recommendations. The estate produces its own wine and olive oil, which is a very Tuscan thing to do.

A contemporary osteria a short walk from Parliament, named for the owners' grandparents, who were in the trade long before it was fashionable. The menu stays close to Roman tradition but makes room for a Marsala Florio pairing that runs alongside each course, which is a more interesting idea than it sounds. Book ahead if you want a seat on the terrace, and book ahead anyway.

Contemporary art lines the walls of this intimate creative restaurant in central Seregno, the result of a longstanding tie-up with a local gallery. The cooking is modern but relaxed, moving easily between meat, fish, and vegetables without the kind of anxiety that usually comes with "creative cuisine." And in a corner of Lombardy where cheese courses have quietly vanished, this one still rolls the trolley.