| 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international image of cheap fizz and rough reds is long out of date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.
A list of food and dishes
To begin, select a topic in the navigation bar to the left
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.
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