Dining Information

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too, are among the finest and most diverse in Europe and the international image of cheap fizz and rough reds is long out of date.

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.