The Best Places to Eat in Italy

Charcoal smoke drifts through the vaulted stone arches of what used to be a royal stable, which sets the mood before you've sat down. This is a meat-forward restaurant in Pollenzo, steps from the University of Gastronomic Sciences, where Piedmontese scottona arrives in several aging stages alongside Chianina and Alpina cuts. The sourcing is serious, the cooking method is fire, and the setting looks like it was designed by someone who understood atmosphere before the word existed.

A small Japanese restaurant on a narrow street in the historic centre, with just enough covers inside and on the terrace to make a reservation feel less optional than the menu suggests. The kitchen runs a classical lineup, hand-rolled gyoza, tempura, raw fish, ramen, and rice dishes executed without fanfare. The Japanese clientele filling most of the seats is its own quiet argument. Sake, shochu, and craft beer, plus wine for the unconvinced.

Lunch only, shared tables, one menu, all meat. The chef behind Solociccia is among Italy's most celebrated butchers, and this is where that obsession becomes a sit-down occasion: a convivial tasting format served at fixed midday sittings across a warren of intimate rooms strung with straw-covered Chianti bottles. A vegetarian alternative exists, though ordering it here has a certain audacity. Book ahead, show up at noon, and make friends with your neighbors.

A family-run seafood trattoria in a small town outside Venice where the husband left metalworking for the kitchen and never looked back. The menu leans into classic fish preparations, simply done with good ingredients, and the wife runs the room with the ease of someone who knows every table by name. Regulars pack it out most nights, so book ahead or prepare to watch someone else eat your fish.

A contemporary Italian restaurant just outside Pordenone's traffic-restricted center, where the kitchen leans into bold, market-driven cooking that moves between land and sea with some confidence. Dishes lean seasonal and generous, the kind of place where the menu shifts with what's good rather than what's safe. The room reads like a proper dinner out, not a quick bite, and the cooking has enough edge to keep things interesting.

A couple who logged serious time cooking abroad before coming home to Legnano runs this intimate contemporary Italian restaurant, where the menu arrives as one of three tasting options or à la carte if you'd rather steer yourself. The cooking is imaginative without showing off about it, and the wine list has clearly been curated by someone who paid attention. The welcome is the kind that makes you feel the room was expecting you.

A small grotto cut into tufa rock anchors the courtyard, with a handful of tables tucked inside, which tells you immediately that this isn't a place for a quick lunch. The young couple running it, Flavia and Alessio, have shaped a regional Italian restaurant around dishes with names like "The Journey I'll Never Forget," poetic in a way that somehow doesn't embarrass itself. The cooking follows suit, rooted in the landscape but with enough imagination to keep it interesting.

A small, unfussy restaurant in Teramo's historic centre, close enough to the medieval cathedral that you can hear the bells. The chef trained under Niko Romito and channels that rigour into contemporary Abruzzese cooking, coaxing something refined out of peasant staples without making them feel ashamed of their origins. Two tasting menus lean heavily on meat, though the vegetable work quietly steals the show.

A chef who spent time in Milan and Venice before bringing the distilled results back to Padua's historic center. This is a creative Italian restaurant where the barbecue grill quietly anchors nearly everything on the menu, lending a smoky throughline to dishes that pull from different corners of the north. The cooking reads as personal rather than fashionable, and the room feels like a place where someone is actually trying to say something.

A frescoed castle hall with ceilings high enough to humble anyone sits as the backdrop for this Piedmontese restaurant in Magliano Alfieri. The chef runs two menus, one a tour through regional tradition, the other a more personal affair where guests choose the number of courses and the kitchen decides the rest. The hills of Langhe and Roero are visible from the windows, which helps set the pace.

Snails get their own section of the menu here, which tells you most of what you need to know about this family-run trattoria on Piazza Carlo Alberto. The kitchen works squarely within Venetian tradition, pulling in Lake Garda touches along the way, and the bigoli with guinea fowl and the calf's liver with onions are exactly as old-school as they sound. In summer, tables spill into a garden with lake glimpses.

Vineyards press right up to the terrace at this contemporary restaurant in the Veneto hills, where a young couple left city life to restore the family home and cook out of it. The menu is short and rotates often, built around bold, playful combinations you won't easily forget. Five guestrooms sit upstairs for anyone who finds the drive home a less appealing prospect than another glass of local wine.

A bonet that arrives as a dark chocolate-draped traditional cake base with a crispy sphere of custard cream on top tells you something about the chef here: Piedmont is the foundation, but the plating has ideas. This contemporary Italian restaurant sits in the foothills near Lake Maggiore with a relaxed, come-as-you-are feel. The menu moves easily between meat and fish, and lunch runs a little lighter for those who have an afternoon to protect.

The name means the scent of aged Vernaccia, and the setting matches the poetry: a converted old mill in a small Sardinian village above the Sinis Peninsula. The young chef pulls from the Gulf of Oristano for ingredients, but his Campanian roots sneak in at dessert, where a reimagined pastiera or babà tends to close things out. A contemporary Mediterranean dinner with a quietly personal backstory.

A wall of wines priced to take home greets you at the door, which tells you something about where this contemporary Mantuan restaurant's priorities lie. The cooking has a clear Lombardian identity, with clean flavors and confident technique. A tortelli split half sweet, half bitter, and a trio of beef cuts served together make the case more convincingly than any menu description could.

A glassed-in veranda they call the "literary veranda" opens onto a citrus garden at the back of an old Bourbon palazzo, and that alone makes Sunrise worth finding. It's a sit-down seafood restaurant with a menu that leans toward fish in every direction, including a full page of raw preparations. Champagne features prominently on the wine list, which tells you something about who this crowd thinks they are.

Fourteen seats arranged in a horseshoe around two chefs is the whole architecture of this intimate omakase counter, where every piece of fish is shaped in front of you and the conversation with the chefs is considered part of the meal. Eating with your hands is encouraged, sake by the glass pairs naturally with the progression, and the lunch menu runs shorter if the full ritual feels like a commitment.

The conveyor belt runs on one side; a hushed omakase room sits on the other. This Japanese restaurant in Rome splits its personality cleanly between Sushisen Kaitenzushi's counter energy and the more formal Experience side, where the chef's tasting sequence takes its time. Both menus share a kitchen, and the all-female service team holds everything together with quiet precision. Sake and wine pour by the glass throughout.

Tano Simonato's creative Italian restaurant sits in a quiet residential neighborhood, which is somewhat at odds with what arrives on the plate: a "tiramisù" built from cuttlefish and potatoes, pigeon glazed in honey and baked in salt. The chef moves between tables, narrating the food and suggesting wine pairings in person. It's a theatrical room that commits fully to the bit, and the bit involves seducing every last sense you walked in with.

The walk from the car park is part of the deal: stone houses, a castle overhead, and then a first-floor trattoria serving the kind of Emilian cooking that makes the drive out to Torrechiara make sense. Stuffed pasta with herbs and a board of local salumi, including Parma ham, anchor the menu. Service is informal without being sloppy, and the wine list covers enough local and Italian bottles that nobody leaves unhappy.

A seafood restaurant on the Torre del Greco waterfront, with picture windows that pull Capri right into the dining room like a painting someone forgot to take down. The kitchen runs almost entirely on what came out of the sea that morning, with raw preparations, oysters, tartare, and ceviche worth lingering over before the kitchen gets involved. Campanian ingredients throughout, harbour views included at no extra charge.

A farmhouse restaurant on the western slopes of Monte Baldo, where the terrace looks straight down to Lake Garda and the menu follows whatever the season is willing to hand over. The kitchen works through meat, fish, and vegetable dishes with local ingredients doing most of the talking. The wine list runs to over a thousand bottles kept in an old underground cellar, which is a serious number for a hillside dining room this quiet.

A kitchen dating back centuries anchors this old-school tavern a short walk from Maratea's main square, its walls dressed in Vietri ceramics and its shelves stacked with around 400 wine labels, many from small Italian producers and France. The chef leans into local cooking, including a stewed octopus that regulars know by name. Small parties of six can eat in the wine cellar among bottles that collectors would eye with envy.

The Ravioli Mimosa, made from a recipe so closely guarded that not even the menu will tell you what's inside, has been on the list since anyone can remember. This is a proper Roman trattoria in Trastevere, the kind that still leads with cacio e pepe, carbonara, and tripe without a hint of apology. The room is rustic but pulled together, the service knows what it's doing, and the beef fillet finished over charcoal closes things out the way Rome intends.

The dining room here used to be the apartment of a senator's librarian, which explains why it feels more like eating inside a very handsome thought than inside a restaurant. Perched above the gardens of the Rocca di Lonato, it's a creative Italian spot where the kitchen works with a light, precise touch. Sea bass and pigeon are the dishes regulars argue over. Come for lunch if you want the room without the full commitment.

Four tables around a central fireplace, walls clad in reclaimed timber: this intimate gourmet tasting-menu room is tucked behind the livelier Kosmo Taste the Mountain, reachable by lift from the car park below. The chef, Apulian by birth but clearly seduced by the Alps, builds creative menus around mountain ingredients and a kitchen garden, and his vegetable dishes, a celeriac study or a plate called "100% carrot," have a way of outlasting everything else in memory.

Tucked off a broad piazza a short walk from Trani's harbour and its cathedral, Terradimare is a small, graceful seafood-forward restaurant where the kitchen follows the daily catch closely and pivots on what came in that morning. The name nods to both land and sea, and the menu honours that, with meat dishes alongside. An all-female front-of-house team runs the room with quiet precision, which sets a tone the food is happy to match.

A converted joinery on a sprawling Tuscan estate, Terraforte is a country-house restaurant where the menu is essentially a tour of the land around it: farm-reared meats, game, poultry, vegetables, herbs, and honey, almost all from the estate itself. You choose how many courses you want and the kitchen composes from there. In warmer months, the terrace earns its reputation without trying. The estate's own wines, including the celebrated Lupicaia, pour by the glass.

Four tables, candlelight, gilded walls inside a Merano villa: this is a tasting-menu restaurant built to feel like a private dinner hosted by someone with strong opinions about biodiversity. Chef Marcello Corrado runs an eight-course menu rooted in the South Tyrol landscape, and a shorter format is available for those who want the same ideas with an earlier bedtime. Service is the kind that notices everything without being noticed.

The first-floor dining room looks straight out at the Duomo and the Galleria, which does make it harder to concentrate on the menu. Chef Valerio Braschi runs a contemporary Italian restaurant where the kitchen moves between Milanese classics and South American and Asian detours, reinterpreting a costoletta alla milanese alongside chimichurri-lifted calamari. The terrace upstairs is where most people end up at some point, aperitivo in hand, staring at the cathedral like it's their first time.

A luminous dining room of warm wood and wide windows onto a manicured garden sets the mood at this contemporary restaurant in San Vito, where a young chef channels years in Italian and French kitchens into something quietly personal. The menu reads as a love letter to Italian identity filtered through serious technique, and the front-of-house paces the tasting menu with the calm confidence of someone who has done this before.

Inside the medieval Castello di Casole, Tosca is a tasting-menu restaurant where the stone walls and candlelit fabrics make it feel like the estate has been expecting you. The kitchen leans into the surrounding 1,300-hectare organic property, pulling herbs and produce from the castle's own gardens. In summer, dinner moves to the open courtyard, with Tuscan hills doing the decorating. Dressy but not stiff, and priced to match the setting.

The sfogline roll fresh pasta right in front of you, and the extra lengths go straight to the adjoining shop. This Bologna trattoria keeps one foot planted in the old school, with Sunday lasagne alla bolognese made the way your nonna's nonna would recognize, and one foot pointed forward in lighter, more contemporary preparations. A heated winter terrace means there's always an excuse to linger longer than planned.

A 19th-century mansion on the Brenta canal, just outside Venice where the villas outnumber the tourists, houses this classic seafood trattoria. The dining room is simple and welcoming, the kind that lets the fish do the talking: Adriatic scampi, lightly seared octopus, and mixed fried fish from the same waters that have been feeding this corner of the Veneto forever.

Wood-panelled walls and staff who seem genuinely pleased to see you set the tone at this old-school trattoria in central Alba. The kitchen stays firmly rooted in Piedmontese tradition, and the wine list reads like a love letter to the Langhe. Tajarin with rabbit and hazelnuts is the dish regulars tend to order without looking up. It's exactly the kind of place you hope exists when you arrive in truffle country.

On the uphill road to the Palazzo Farnese, this old-school family trattoria in Caprarola has been turning out northern Lazio cooking for five generations, and the kitchen cooks like it plans to go five more. The food is rooted in Tuscia, with some Tuscan drift, and the wine list runs to around 900 labels, many available by the glass, managed by the cook's son after a stint in fancier rooms abroad.

A trattoria on the main road through San Nicolò that has built its reputation almost entirely on fish, which is an unlikely move this far inland in Emilia-Romagna. The dining room was recently done up, though the cooking stays traditional. Weekday lunches lean simpler; evenings open into a longer menu if you ask. Sunday winters bring a full meat feast, from anolini in broth to boiled meats, that the regulars have clearly memorized.

Grandmother Erminia's recipes still run the kitchen at this family trattoria tucked into the hills above Felino, in the Parma countryside. The Leoni family has been doing regional Emilian cooking the old-school way for generations, salame aged in their own cellar, rabbit alla cacciatora boned and slow-cooked into something that makes you understand why this corner of Italy has such a high opinion of itself.

Tortellini in Parmigiano cream and bollito misto are the kind of dishes that remind you why Emilian cooking has a reputation to defend. This is an old-school trattoria doing the regional classics without modernizing the soul out of them: fresh egg pastas, cotechino with stewed beans, and the celebrated zuppa inglese to finish. When the weather cooperates, tables spill into the intimate Piazza della Pomposa, and the meal gets considerably harder to leave.

A fireplace warms the main room of this old-school Tuscan trattoria in the stone village of San Quirico d'Orcia, with a pergola garden out back for warmer months. The cooking is rooted deep in the territory: hand-rolled pasta, truffle, meats and game, the kind of menu that doesn't need to explain itself. A wine list heavy on local labels keeps the whole thing honest.