World Travel Guide Search for a City   Destination Guides > Europe & Russia > Europe > Italy Italy •  Italy •  Where To Go •  Getting There •  Red Tape And Visas •  Insurance And Health Cover •  Costs, Money And Banks •  Travellers With Disabilities •  The North-south Divide •  Getting Around •  Food And Drink •  Communications: Post, Phones And The Media •  Trouble And The Police •  Women? And Sexual Harassment •  Work And Study •  History •  Best Of •  Information And Maps •  Health •  Opening Hours And Public Holidays •  Festivals •  Sports And Outdoor Pursuits •  Directory •  Painting And Sculpture •  Architecture •  Mafia, 'Ndrangheta, Camorra: Socialized Crime In Southern Italy •  Language •  Explore Italy ITALY - FOOD AND DRINK Italy    view all cities Top Destinations •  Florence (Firenze) •  Genoa •  Milan (Milano) •  Naples •  Padua •  Palermo •  Pisa •  Rome •  Siena •  Turin (Torino) •  Venice •  Verona •  Vicenza   Although it has long been popular primarily for its cheapness and convenience, Italian food occupies a revered place as one of the world's great cuisines. The southern Italian diet especially, with its emphasis on olive oil, fresh and plentiful fruit, vegetables and fish, is one of the healthiest in Europe, and there are few national cuisines that can boast so much variety in both ingredients and cooking methods. Italy's wines, too, are among the finest and most diverse in Europe and the international image of cheap fizz and rough reds is long out of date.   The basics of Italian cuisine Although the twentieth century has done much to blur the regional differences of Italian food, they are still there - and often highly evident, with the French influence strong in Piemonte, Austrian flavours in Alto Adige, and even Greek in Calabria. Italy has remained largely untouched by the latter-day boom in non-indigenous eating, partly due to its lack of any substantial colonial legacy but also because of the innate chauvinism of Italian eating habits. The exceptions are the Chinese restaurants that crop up in every town, the ubiquitous burger bars, and recently Spanish, Japanese and North African cuisine has started to pop up in more cosmopolitan towns especially, of course, Rome and Milan. More usually, the exotic option is sampling cooking from other parts of the country. Milan tends to be the favourite melting-pot, with restaurants specializing in food from all regions. True to the stereotype that every Italian believes that Italian food is the best in the world and that mamma's is always the perfect example, many restaurants are simply an extension of the home dining table. Adventure is not usually on the menu. There has been some limited experimentation with new, "trendier" ingredients like wholewheat pasta and brown rice, but probably the best you'd get if you asked a waiter for any such thing would be a raised eyebrow; request a wholewheat pizza and you'd certainly be laughed out of sight. Vegetarian restaurants , too, have been slow to catch on, and you're only likely to find them in major cities, but there are always plenty of non-meat choices on every menu. Perhaps the most striking thing about eating in Italy is how deeply embedded in the culture it really is. Food is celebrated with gusto: traditional meals tend to consist of many courses and can seem to last forever, starting with an antipasto, followed by a risotto or a pasta dish, leading on to a fish or meat course, cheese, and finished with fresh fruit and coffee. Even everyday meals are a scaled-down version of the full-blown affair. Shopping for food is a serious matter. Supermarkets have yet to make any real impact on the dominance of the traditional store in town centres, and foodstores of every description abound. Street markets, too, can be exhilarating, selling bountiful, fresh and flavoursome produce. Happily, the Italians as yet haven't adopted the heavy cropping methods which result in completely tasteless produce - even a simple raw tomato can be a revelation. Foods like bread and cheese are still made with an eye on quality. Bread is almost entirely made by small bakeries and tends to get heavier, crustier and more salty the further south you go (for eating with salty hams, salami and cheeses there is pane senza sale ). Cheese is often factory produced, with large firms like the Milan-based Galbani marketing common varieties like Bel Paese, Gorgonzola and Taleggio. But cheese-making also remains in the hands of local farmers working to traditional recipes: local tastes are much in evidence. Breakfast, snacks and ice cream Most Italians start their day in a bar, their breakfast consisting of a coffee with hot milk ( cappuccino ) and a brioche or cornetto - a jam-, custard- or chocolate-filled croissant, which you usually help yourself to from the counter and eat standing at the bar. Breakfast in a hotel ( prima colazione ) is often a limp affair of bread and processed meats, often not worth the price. At other times of the day, sandwiches ( panini ) can be pretty substantial, a bread stick or roll packed with any number of fillings. A sandwich bar ( paninoteca ) in larger towns and cities, and in smaller places a grocer's shop ( alimentari ) will normally make you up whatever you want; you'll pay £3000-5000/?1.55-2.58 each. Bars may also offer tramezzini , ready-made sliced white bread with mixed fillings - less appetizing than the average panino but still tasty and slightly cheaper at around £3000/?1.55 a time. Toasted sandwiches ( toast ) are common, too: in a paninoteca you can get whatever you want toasted; in ordinary bars it's more likely to be a variation on cheese or ham with tomato. If you want hot takeaway food there are a number of options. It's possible to find slices of pizza ( pizza rustica or pizza al taglio ) pretty much everywhere, and you can get most of the things already mentioned, plus pasta, chips, even full hot meals, in a távola calda , a sort of stand-up snack bar that's at its best in the morning when everything is fresh. Some are self-service and have limited seating, too. The bigger towns have these, and there's often one inside larger train stations. Another alternative is a rosticceria , where the speciality is spit-roast chicken but other fast foods such as slices of pizza, chips and hamburgers, or stuffed roasted vegetables, are also often served. Other sources of quick snacks are markets , some of which sell takeaway food from stalls, including focacce - oven-baked pastries topped with cheese or tomato or filled with spinach, fried offal or meat - and arancini or supplì - deep-fried balls of rice with meat ( rosso ) or butter and cheese ( bianco ) filling. Supermarkets , also, are an obvious stop for a picnic lunch: the major department store chains, Upim and Standa, often have food halls. Italian ice cream ( gelato ) is justifiably famous: a cone ( un cono ) is an indispensable accessory to the evening passeggiata. Most bars have a fairly good selection, but for real choice go to a gelateria , where the range is a tribute to the Italian imagination and flair for display. You'll sometimes have to go by appearance rather than attempting to decipher their exotic names, many of which don't even mean much to Italians: often the basics - chocolate and strawberry - are best. There's no problem locating the finest gelateria in town - it's the one that draws the crowds - and we've noted the really special places throughout the Guide. If in doubt, go for the places that make their own ice cream, denoted by the sign "Produzione Propria" outside. Pizza Pizza is now a worldwide phenomenon, but Italy remains the best place to eat it. The creations served up here - especially in the city where pizza started, Naples - are wholly different from the soggy concoctions that have taken over the international fast-food market. Everywhere in Italy pizza comes thin and flat, not deep-pan, and the choice of toppings is fairly limited, with none of the dubious pineapple and sweetcorn variations. It's easy to find pizzas cooked in the traditional way, in wood-fired ovens ( forno a legna ) rather than the squeaky-clean electric ones, so that the pizzas arrive blasted and bubbling on the surface and with a distinctive charcoal taste. Pizzerias range from a stand-up counter selling slices to a fully fledged sit-down restaurant, and on the whole they don't sell much else besides pizza, soft drinks and beer. Some straight restaurants often have pizza on the menu, too. A basic cheese and tomato pizza ( margherita ) costs around £6000-8000/?3.10-4.13 (sometimes less in the south, often more in the north), a fancier variety £8000-15,000/?4.13-7.75, and it's quite acceptable to cut it into slices and eat it with your fingers. Meals: Lunch and dinner Full meals are often elaborate affairs, generally served in either a trattoria or a ristorante . Traditionally, a trattoria is a cheaper and more basic purveyor of homestyle cooking ( cucina casalinga ), while a ristorante is more upmarket, with aproned waiters and tablecloths, though these days the two are often interchangeable. The main differences you'll notice now are to do with opening times: often trattorias, at least in rural areas, will be open at lunchtime - there won't be a menu and the waiter will simply reel off a list of what's on that day. In large towns both will be open in the evening, but there'll be more choice in a ristorante, which will always have a menu and sometimes a help-yourself antipasto buffet. In either, pasta dishes go for around £8000-10,000/?4.13-5.17, and there's usually no problem just having this; the main fish or meat courses will normally be anything between £10,000/?5.17 and £15,000/?7.75. At the end of the meal ask for the bill ( il conto ); bear in mind that almost everywhere you'll pay a cover charge ( coperto ) on top of your food of around £3000/?1.55 a head. In many trattorias this doesn't amount to much more than an illegible scrap of paper; if you want to check it, ask to have a receipt ( ricevuta ), something all bars and restaurants are legally bound to provide anyway (indeed they - and you - can be fined if you don't take the receipt with you and the same applies to shops and bars). In more expensive places service ( servizio ) will often be added on top of the cover charge, generally about ten percent. If service isn't included you can choose to tip about the same amount, but unless you're particularly pleased with the service it's common just to leave a few coins. Other types of eating places include those that bill themselves as everything - trattoria ristorante-pizzeria - and perform no function very well, serving mediocre food that you could get at better prices elsewhere. Look out also for spaghetterias, restaurant-bars which serve basic pasta dishes and are often the hangout of the local youth. Osterie are common too, basically an old-fashioned restaurant or pub-like place specializing in home cooking, though some extremely upmarket places with pretensions to established antiquity borrow the name. In our listings, we've indicated the regular weekly closing day . Traditionally, a meal (lunch is pranzo , dinner is cena ) starts with antipasto (literally "before the meal"), a course generally served only in ristoranti and consisting of various cold cuts of meat, seafood and various cold vegetable dishes. Prosciutto is a common antipasto dish, ham either cooked ( cotto ) or just cured and hung ( crudo ) and served alone or with mozzarella cheese. A plateful of various antipasti from a self-service buffet will set you back £8000-10,000/?4.13-5.17 a head, an item chosen from the menu a few thousand less. The next course, il primo , consists of a soup, risotto or pasta dish, and is followed by il secondo - the meat or fish course, usually served alone, except for perhaps a wedge of lemon or tomato. Watch out when ordering fish, which will either be served whole or by weight: 250g is usually plenty for one person, or ask to have a look at the fish before it's cooked. You may need quite an appetite to tackle all three courses; those on a budget will fill up best with just pasta, though portions can be quite small - in most places to it's fine to eat just a pasta course and nothing else. Vegetables or salads - contorni - are ordered and served separately, and sometimes there won't be much choice: potatoes will usually come as chips ( patate fritte ), but you can also find boiled ( lesse ) or roast ( arrostite ), while salads are either green ( verde ) or mixed ( mista ). If there's no menu, the verbal list of what's available can be bewildering; if you don't understand, just ask for what you want. Everywhere will have pasta with tomato sauce ( pomodoro ) or meat sauce ( al ragù ). Afterwards you nearly always get a choice of fresh fruit ( frutta ) and a selection of desserts ( dolci ) - sometimes just ice cream or macedonia (fresh fruit salad), but often more elaborate items, like cassata (ice cream made with ricotta) or zuppa inglese (spongecake or trifle). Sadly, the indulgent dessert of zabaglione is rarely available at any but the most upmarket places. Italy isn't a bad country to travel in if you're a vegetarian , but unless you're determined you can end up eating endless plates of pizza and pasta with tomato sauce. There are, however, other pasta sauces without meat, some superb vegetable antipasti and if you eat fish and seafood you should have no problem at all. Salads, too, are fresh and good. The only real difficulty is one of comprehension: Italians don't understand someone not eating meat, and stating the obvious doesn't always get the point across. Saying you're a vegetarian ( Sono vegetariano/a ) and asking if a dish has meat in it ( c'è carne dentro? ) might still turn up a poultry or prosciutto dish. Better is to ask what a dish is made with before you order ( com'è fatto? ) so that you can spot the non-meaty meat. Vegans will have a much harder time, though pizzas without cheese ( marinara - nothing to do with fish - is a common option) are a good standby, vegetable soup is usually just that and the fruit is excellent. Drinking Although many Italian children are brought up on wine and a mezzo (half-litre carafe) is a standard accompaniment to any meal, there's not a great emphasis on dedicated drinking in Italy. You'll rarely see drunks in public, young people don't devote their nights to getting wasted, and women especially are frowned upon if they're seen to be overindulging. Nonetheless there's a wide choice of alcoholic drinks available, often at low prices; soft drinks come in multifarious hues, thanks to the abundance of fresh fruit; and there are also mineral water and crushed-ice drinks: you'll certainly never be stuck if you want to slake your thirst.