The Best Places to Eat in Italy

A nineteenth-century building with a balcony running the inner courtyard sets the tone for this Piedmontese restaurant in the small town of Caluso. The menu is a fairly faithful portrait of the region: lots of meat, some fish, vegetables that sometimes come from the kitchen garden out back. It feels like someone's grandmother's house if grandmother had a strong opinion about local sourcing and a cellar worth investigating.

The picture windows frame the Tyrrhenian Sea so completely that the blue of the water bleeds into the dining room. This is a proper sit-down restaurant on Capri, where the kitchen runs classic Italian dishes alongside modern reinterpretations, the kind of place where a lemon tartlet arrives dusted with caper and pepper powder and somehow makes perfect sense. Dress a little, bring someone worth impressing, and let the bay do half the work.

A Baroque palazzo on a quiet piazza, with a fine staircase leading up to a quietly stylish dining room, is the kind of setting that could coast on atmosphere alone. This fine dining restaurant doesn't, though. The kitchen turns out creative regional cooking built around local meat and fish, served as a four, eight, or more course surprise menu. Book the terrace table for two early, very early.

The dining room sits right on the edge of Lake Orta, with views that stretch out to the Island of San Giulio, which is the kind of backdrop that makes it hard to focus on the menu. This is a hotel restaurant with Mediterranean cooking that occasionally takes a detour into more inventive territory. The roof terrace bar upstairs handles aperitifs and after-dinner drinks, and the wine cellar is well stocked for the serious-minded.

The outdoor terrace sits a few steps from the Viareggio promenade, which makes choosing a table inside a decision you'll quietly regret. This is a seafood restaurant where the kitchen leans on personal technique rather than obvious spectacle, the wine list rewards browsing, and the service is the kind that feels attentive without being theatrical. Bring people you want to linger with; the sea view does a lot of the conversational heavy lifting.

Stone columns and vaulted ceilings from a centuries-old Dominican monastery frame a dining room that goes firmly minimalist, with pale floors and a glass-fronted wine wall as the main decoration. The contemporary menu leans into Puglian ingredients without making a fuss about it. Service is the kind that's attentive without hovering, which in a room this old and serious is exactly what the architecture already asks of everyone.

A courtyard at the back opens up in warm weather, and it's the kind of detail that turns a competent dinner into a whole evening. This is a proper sit-down restaurant in the center of Stradella, serving classic Italian cooking nudged gently toward the contemporary, land and sea trading places across the menu. The room is put together with quiet care, and the service has enough warmth to make you feel noticed without making you feel managed.

Full-size bronze gongs anchor the room at this sleek contemporary Chinese restaurant near Porta Venezia, setting a tone that's somewhere between meditative and quietly theatrical. The menu runs Chinese traditional with a modern edge, and the staff will walk you through it without being asked. A whole tasting menu dedicated to Peking duck suggests the kitchen knows where its strengths lie.

A former post-house turned full-on regional restaurant in the South Tyrolean countryside, Hanswirt decorates its dining rooms in classic Tyrolean style and grows much of what it serves on a farm in the Senales valley. Goat kid and lamb from that farm anchor the menu, with freshwater fish alongside, though the kitchen slides south occasionally for a braised aubergine tartare with burrata. A hotel of the same name sits quietly around the back.

The open kitchen keeps things honest at this contemporary Italian restaurant on the Viareggio coast, where the menu splits cleanly between meat and fish and French technique quietly shapes both sides. The maître knows the cellar as well as the kitchen, and the cellar runs deep, Sassicaia to Petrus, so dinner here has a way of becoming a longer conversation than you planned.

A lit fireplace and wooden furniture set the tone at this family-run trattoria in Udine, where the cooking is rooted in Friuli but not afraid to wander. Frico with Montasio and plum gnocchi in clarified butter share the menu with tuna tataki and bottarga, and a thoughtfully built vegan menu sits alongside all of it. The kind of room where the warmth is structural, not decorative.

The switchback road up from the Amalfi Coast is genuinely punishing, which is part of why the sea view from the terrace hits so hard when you finally arrive. This is a regional trattoria in the cliff-hanging village of Furore, where the Marisa Cuomo winery sits directly across the street, a convenient arrangement. The kitchen leans on local ingredients cooked in a traditional idiom with enough personal touches to keep things interesting.

Perched on a big pedestrian piazza at the edge of Alba's old town, this trattoria-style spot splits its menu between Piedmontese classics and whatever fish looked good at the market that morning. The breaded anchovies with saor sauce show up on most lists of reasons to come. Local wines and regional beers fill out a drinks list that takes both seriously, which in Piedmont is either obvious or everything, depending on whom you ask.

Four tables tucked behind a delicatessen that has been selling cured meats in Modena since, roughly, forever. The menu at this tiny trattoria is a straightforward argument for Emilian cooking: gnocco fritto, tortellini in capon broth, slow-cooked beef with mashed potatoes. The charcuterie comes from free-range Mora Romagnola pigs, which is the kind of detail that separates a place from its imitators. Book ahead, because four tables fill fast.

A modern Italian restaurant set inside an old monastery, with a wine cellar dining room and a courtyard terrace when the weather cooperates. The chef cooks personal, Italian-rooted food with the occasional South American lean, a nod to his Ecuadorian wife, who runs the front of house and keeps the wine list unusually interesting. Colorful, generous plates in a setting that makes the slightly out-of-the-way drive feel like exactly the point.

The seventeenth-century Carracci school ceiling sets the tone before you've ordered a thing: this is a fine dining room inside the Grand Hotel Majestic, dressed for occasions. The chef bridges Naples and Bologna with quiet confidence, a contemporary Mediterranean menu moving between sea and land. The sommelier is serious, but the cocktail pairings are the unexpected move worth noting.

A centuries-old stone complex on the road to Rome, now home to a quietly serious Umbrian restaurant run by three brothers, two in the kitchen and one steering the wine in the dining room. The cooking draws on local traditions with a Venetian thread woven through, the result of the family's roots. Herbs come from the garden out back, and the portions are the kind that make you revise your dessert plans.

A garden gazebo for summer candlelit dinners, and a hushed, few-table dining room that earns its advance booking in winter: I Salotti is a creative restaurant anchored to its own farm, so the menu moves with what the land is doing. The wine cellar, assembled over many years, runs to more than two thousand Italian labels. Chiusi is not exactly on everyone's Tuscan itinerary, which is rather the point.

A garden terrace with a front-row view of Orvieto's Duomo sets the scene at this modern Italian restaurant tucked into the old city. The chef works a seasonal menu built around regional ingredients, and the wine list leans into local Umbrian bottles with the kind of care that makes you order a second glass before you've decided on dessert. Unhurried and unshowy, it's a good argument for lingering over lunch.

A dessert called i-CLOUD, a soft yogurt foam over vanilla panna cotta with sorbets, tells you something about the ambitions here. This is a contemporary Italian restaurant in Rimini where the menu leans hard into Adriatic fish, treated with modern technique but enough substance that you leave full. The room is all white walls, mirrors, and glass, with a garden terrace that earns its keep in warmer months.

A family-run trattoria in Carpi where the pasta is the whole point and nobody pretends otherwise. The menu runs deep into Emilian tradition, the kind of place where tortellini in Parmesan cream and gramigna with ragu feel less like choices than obligations. Desserts follow suit with sbrisolona and zuppa inglese. The room is warm, unhurried, and loud with the particular happiness of people who know exactly what they ordered.

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.