The best Italian cities to visit if you love food

From Rome's four essential pastas to Palermo's market stalls where spleen sandwiches reflect a thousand years of Arab and Norman influence

Italian food has spread across the world so thoroughly that most travelers arrive in Italy believing they already know what to expect. They have eaten carbonara, pizza margherita, and tiramisu. What most of them have not eaten is carbonara made in Rome, pizza margherita made in Naples, or tiramisu made in the Veneto, and the difference between the versions they know and the originals is the central argument for food travel in Italy. The ingredients are fresher, the preparation reflects generations of regional practice that no Italian restaurant abroad has had sufficient time to develop, and the dish exists in its native culinary and cultural context in ways that alter not just the food but the experience of eating it.

The most significant revelation for most first-time Italian food travelers is how radically the cuisine varies across regions. The pasta dishes of Bologna, rich and meat-laden, share almost nothing with the seafood-forward preparations of Venice’s bacari or the olive oil and vegetable traditions of Puglia’s cucina povera. The coffee culture of Naples, where espresso is pulled at different temperatures and pressures than anywhere else in the country, produces a cup that devoted visitors have flown back to drink again. The street food of Palermo, rooted in the Arab, Norman, and Spanish occupations of Sicily, is unlike anything available in northern Italy.

The 10 cities below appear in Travel Leisure, with recommendations from American writer and Rome resident Laura Itzkowitz and Maria Pasquale, a Rome-based writer and author of Mangia: How to Eat Your Way Through Italy. Both writers draw on firsthand experience eating across Italy’s distinct regional food cultures, and the cities they have chosen reflect the full range of what Italian food travel can be, from Michelin-starred fine dining to market stalls serving fried spleen sandwiches.

1. Rome demands the four classic pastas on every visit

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Rome’s food identity is organized around a quartet of pastas whose collective simplicity is deceptive: cacio e pepe, carbonara, amatriciana, and gricia share ingredients and techniques in overlapping configurations, and mastering the distinctions between them is both a pleasure and a practical education in Roman culinary logic. Cacio e pepe uses only Pecorino Romano cheese and black pepper. Carbonara adds guanciale and egg yolk. Amatriciana introduces tomato alongside the guanciale and Pecorino. Gricia is amatriciana without the tomato. The variations are small, and the differences in the finished dishes are enormous, which is the specific lesson that Roman pasta teaches most clearly: ingredient selection and technique produce complexity that the length of the ingredient list does not predict.

Beyond pasta, the supplì gives Rome its most portable representative food: oval-shaped fried rice balls with a crunchy breadcrumb exterior, available at pizzerias and street food spots, including Supplizio. Pizza e mortazza, the quintessential Roman sandwich of pizza bianca stuffed with thin slices of mortadella, gives the midday meal a street-food format specific to Roman cuisine. Both serve as quick lunch or snack options for visitors whose schedules do not always allow a full trattoria sit-down.

Rome’s restaurant diversity extends well beyond the Roman classics. Excellent sushi, innovative fine dining, and a full spectrum of international cooking occupy the city alongside the old-school trattorias, whose blackboard menus change daily with the morning’s market arrivals. The classics, however, are the appropriate starting point: a visitor who has not tried all four Roman pastas has not finished the mandatory syllabus, and the trattorias of the Testaccio neighborhood, historically the home of Rome’s slaughterhouse workers and the cucina romana tradition they developed around offal and secondi, give the best access to the full classical repertoire. Testaccio’s proximity to the Aventine hill and the Circus Maximus makes it an easy walk from central tourist areas, and the neighborhood’s working-class character, maintained by the old market building that anchors its central piazza, gives the restaurant scene an authenticity that the more tourist-facing neighborhoods near the Colosseum and the Campo de’ Fiori do not sustain at the same level.

2. Florence serves bistecca and the lampredotto sandwich

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Florence’s food culture extends beyond the city’s art tourism reputation. The bistecca alla fiorentina, the massive T-bone steak made with premium Chianina beef and served rare, is Florence’s most dramatically scaled dish: a steak ordered by weight and cooked over wood or charcoal, typically served with nothing more than olive oil, salt, and perhaps white beans, whose simplicity reflects the specific Florentine confidence in the quality of the primary ingredient. The Chianina cattle breed, raised in the Valdichiana valley between Florence and Siena, gives the bistecca its specific flavor and texture, qualities that the same cut from other cattle does not replicate.

The lampredotto tradition is the most unexpected Florentine food experience. Lampredotto is the fourth stomach of the cow, boiled and sliced, served in a bread roll that is typically dipped in the cooking broth before assembly, then finished with salsa verde. The sandwich trucks that serve it around the Mercato Centrale and the Sant’Ambrogio market give the experience a street-food immediacy that trattoria lampredotto, served at a table as a secondo, does not produce in the same terms. Maria Pasquale specifically recommends seeking out the lampredotto trucks, which represent an age-old Florentine tradition that the tourist restaurant circuit rarely engages.

The Mercato Centrale itself gives Florence’s food culture its most concentrated daytime expression: crostini with various toppings, pasta with truffles foraged from the surrounding Tuscan countryside, fresh produce from the market’s ground floor, and the surrounding neighborhood’s independent........

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