---

Italy Restaurants

Is the Italian cuisine the best in the world? It's hard to answer yes without seeming nationalist, but it would be hard for anyone not to agree! Certainly, the richness of our regional cuisine offers a variety of incomparable tastes: from Mediterranean flavors in Campani and Calabresi recipes to the Padani flavors of the tortelli and Lombardi and Venetian dishes, from the meat based Piemontesi recipes to the delicate seafood of the Liguria, Marche and Tuscany regions. Moreover, the length of our peninsula and collection of different climatic and terrain diversities -- lots of sea and lengthy coastlines that sorround plains, wood and mountains -- offer many ingredients that the creative Italian cuisine cannot not take advantage of: where else can you find such a tasty competition between authentic pleasures of cuisine such as the butter of the north and the olive oil of the south? The long history and various international influences on Italian soil (the Arabs in Sicily, Calabria and Apulia, the Spanish in Campania, the French and Austrians in the North) did the rest, enriching with delicious recipes the alread strong secular food traditions.

The Italian restaurants are the perfect example: we can find the Neapolitan pizza and all kinds of pasta all over Italy, seafood anywhere (surprisingly, the freshest can even be found in Milan) and, just about anywhere, trattorie that offer the best Appennino mushrooms, the white Alba truffles as well as the Black Umbria ones, also Sicilian and Pugliese restaurants can be found all over the peninsula. The regional cuisine dishes also have a part in the globalization of tastes and food offerings: the pesto is not just completely Ligure and the baccalà has long passed the Veneto boundries, bringing with it the right wines to drink with; on the other hand, Sicilian wines have risen to the north of Italy to wash down eggplant and pasta with sarde recipes. The Roman cuisine is the undisputed king of middle Italy, but the amatriciana and carbonara can now be found in all restaurants and trattorie all over Italy. The proof of Italy's cuisine's amazing strength is in the fast food menus, the same all over the world, that had to be reviewed and modified with suggestions tied to the local habits.

The Italian chefs were able to climb to the peak of top quality cuisine by creating high class restaurants that have now become world-known icons of taste, while still continuing to offer traditional popular and peasant dishes and valorizing "poor" dishes like polenta and tripe. At the same time, while the cuisine quality of hotel restaurants in constantly on the rise, the cheap locande and trattorie category is still going strong, the number of trendy and "in" places is increasing and the ethnic restaurants are growing in number: where once there were only cheap Chinese restaurants, now you can find numerous sushi restaurant in both Rome and Milan. But besides the Japanese cuisine we can also find Mexican and Tex-Mex (especially in shopping centers), Arab kebabs, Oriental (like Vietnamise and Thai) and the best Argentine and Brasilian asada meat. In short, between ethnic restaurants and local trattorie you have lots to choose from, whether it be in a tavern in the Perugia city center or an osteria in the Piedmont countryside or in more modern technological Montalcino or Chianti cantines or Florence wineries or panoramic terraces in Campania's most famous tourist locations.