This list is purely personal, focusing on the occasion as much as the menu. As such, I've made no attempt to be representative. Northern Italy hardly gets a look in, and a couple of them weren't even in restaurants at all. I'm sure you'll have your own suggestions and favourites, which you can post in the comments below. Buon appetito!
Price guide
Cheap: up to €10pp
Medium: €25-30pp
Expensive: above €30pp
Antichi Sapori, northern Puglia
Castel del Monte, Frederick II's amazing 13th-century octagonal castle, sits in the middle of nowhere in northern Puglia, so it was in some desperation that I drove through endless olive groves looking for dinner, before entering a village little bigger than a crossroads and stumbling into Antichi Sapori for what turned out to be a mind-blowing feast. Out came fresh ricotta, salami with fennel seeds, pecorino and fava beans for antipasto, followed by pasta with artichoke and bacon sauce, velvety pumpkin and truffle soup and very tender buffalo fillet. When the sweet trolley was parked at the table, laden with ricotta, apple and chocolate cakes, the waiter vanished and I slowly realised the trolley wasn't going anywhere else – it was all for me.
Price: medium
• Piazza Sant'Isidoro 10, Montegrosso di Andria, +39 0883 569529, pietrozito.it
Antica Trattoria Volano, Ferrara
The magnificent salama da sugo, a speciality of Ferrrara, has the most intensely meaty taste one can experience, and it's no wonder. To make it, various parts of the pig, including cheek, shoulder, tongue and liver, are minced, mixed with spices and red wine, stuffed in a pig's bladder and hung for a year. Then mould is scraped off and the package is boiled for hours before being cut open and served, whereupon dark juices ooze from the insanely rich mince and soak into the pile of potato puree served alongside. It's all washed down with strong local red. When I stumbled out of Antica Trattoria Volano after eating it for the first time I thought I would die of heart failure, but after pedalling my rented bike drunkenly around Ferrara's piazzas for half an hour, breathing in the bitterly cold night air, I was ready for pudding.
Price: medium-expensive
• Viale Volano 20, Ferrara, +39 0532 761421, anticatrattoriavolano.it
Etoile D'Or, Catania, Sicily
An alley leads from Catania's elegant Piazza Duomo into another world, where the grimy port starts, the smell of the fish market drifts in the trees, railway arches give shelter to stalls selling glasses of fruit juice and the Etoile d'Or bar churns out cheap but excellent snacks 24 hours a day to waves of market stall holders, low-lifes and nightclubbers. The arancini – massive, deep-fried balls of rice, mozzarella and ragù which leave scotch eggs for dead – are worth the flight from England alone, while the enormous, garishly lit glass display cases are also packed with fresh cannoli and cassata – the Sicilian sponge and ricotta cream confection covered in icing.
Price: cheap
• Via Beato Cardinale 7, Benedetto Dusmet, Catania, +39 095 340 135
Dau Bobba, San Pietro, Sardinia
Dau Bobba serves local hand-caught tuna (pictured) on the idyllic, unspoilt island of San Pietro, off the south-west of Sardinia. The restaurant is tucked away down a sandy road opposite salt pans where flamingos loiter. If that wasn't enough to make it great, I had lunch there with a very smooth Italian journalist who announced: "When I eat good fish, I insist on drinking only champagne – and I'm buying." Then, to top it all, came the pudding, a warm helping of sheep's cheese covered in honey and washed down with a glass of local passito – the Italian, nectar-like gold-coloured dessert wine made from sun-dried grapes.
Price: expensive
• Località Segni, Carloforte, San Pietro, +39 078 1854037, ristorantedaubobba.it
Trattoria da Marcello, Rome
Rome's San Lorenzo neighbourhood, stuck between the train station, the cemetery and a flyover, is now full of student pubs, but keeps its working-class origins alive at Marcello, where I first ate the typical Roman dish pajata di agnello – lamb's intestines that have been plaited and roasted with rosemary and bacon, turning the mother's milk inside the tube-like intestines into a delicious creamy cheese. At the time, the owner was also using veal intestines, rather than lamb, for that other Roman classic, rigatoni con la pajata. But since the mad cow disease ban on veal, he now uses all the lamb pajata he can get for the more popular pasta dish. That means no more roast lamb pajata – which is a real shame – "unless my supply of intestines increases," he told me last week.
Price: medium
• Via dei Campani 12, +39 06 4463311
Cocchi, Parma
The region of Emilia Romagna is reckoned by many to offer the best food in Italy, starting with its prosciutto and parmesan, but the less known bollito misto (pictured), literally mixed boiled meat, is unmissable, hence my trip to Cocchi – a much-vaunted restaurant on an anonymous busy road on the outskirts of Parma. After a tris di tortelli – little packets of pasta stuffed with pumpkin, herbs and potato – a waiter appeared pushing a metal cabinet on wheels out of which he extracted lumps of boiled beef, veal, smooth tongue, cotechino (a fatty pork sausage) and zampone (stuffed pig's trotter), before slicing them finely and serving them with salsa verde and the secret ingredient that really gave the meat zing: mostarda – a confection of candied fruit and essence of mustard which mixes fruity sweetness with the potent kick of wasabi.
Price: expensive
• At the Hotel Daniel, Via Gramsci 16a, +39 0521 981 990, hoteldaniel.biz/ristorante.html
Leon D'Oro, Leonessa, Lazio
It is tricky to do liver well, which is why it worth seeking out Leon D'Oro in the small, medieval town of Leonessa (pictured), where they bind slices of pork liver in small nets of pig fat and bay leaves then grill them slowly on the hearth, giving the liver a wonderfully sweet, slightly burned taste. At an altitude of 1,000m in the Apennines, two hours from Rome, Leonessa is handy for skiing on Mount Terminillo, but is also a cool bolthole from the capital in the summer. Long walks can start or finish at Leon D'Oro, which also does a renowned potato tart cooked with truffle and cheese, and gnocchi with porcini mushrooms and gorgonzola.
Price: medium
• Corse San Giuseppe 120, Leonessa, +39 0746 923 320, ristoranteleondoroleonessa.com
Zia Belledda, Cabras, Sardinia
During a holiday on the Sinis peninsula in western Sardinia, which boasts windswept, quartz-crystal beaches and Phoenician ruins, I drove to a warehouse on an industrial estate to buy bottarga, the dried fish roe that Italians slice finely into pasta. On a tip, I stopped in nearby Cabras – a low-slung, dusty town – for a fish meal at Zia Belledda, which is still going strong in a backstreet after five decades, and where the massive portions of perfectly deep-fried squid, pasta with courgette, shrimp and bottarga, and steaming plates of fat mussels, served by friendly large women, are matched only by the ridiculously low price. The fregola – tiny semolina pasta swimming in a clam stew – was a standout, as was the seada – a Sardinian, deep-fried pastry stuffed with fresh sheep's cheese and topped with warm honey.
Price: medium
• Via Amsicora 43, Cabras, +39 0783 290 801
Panificio Altese Bartolomeo, Trapani, Sicily
This Easter I took the overnight ferry from Civitavecchia, near Rome, to Trapani, on Sicily's west coast, to see the gruelling 24-hour procession of marching bands and men hefting life-size tableaux from the crucifixion around the baroque streets (pictured). Ravenous and looking for breakfast after the rough overnight crossing, I walked a block from the port to Via Biscottai – "street of the biscuit makers" – so named in the distant past for the bakers who supplied the docking ships. This end of town was heavily bombed in the war by the Allies, targeting the submarines holed up at the port, and among the new blocks I wandered into a small, unnamed bakery with one table where I was given a warm, soft calzone topped with sesame seeds and filled with prosciutto and mozzarella, followed by a small sugar-crusted pastry filled with tart orange and lemon jam, all for a couple of euros.
Price: cheap
• Via Biscottai 45, Trapani, +39 0923 540200
Forno Boccione, Rome
The best hangover cure in Rome on a Sunday morning is the oven-singed ricotta cake dished out by grumpy ladies at the tiny Boccione bakery in the old Jewish ghetto. After slavering over the smell wafting out of the door as you queue for hours, panicking that they might run out, you need to decide in a hurry at the counter between the chocolate or wild cherry version of the cake, and whether to splurge on the pizze – heavy squares of scone-like dough baked with candied fruit, almonds, pine nuts, raisins and burned on top – so delicious even Pope Benedict reportedly has it delivered. The fast turnover means the goods are warm and best consumed immediately, on the street, in front of envious queuers before a brisk walk down the Tiber.
Price: cheap
• Via del Portico d'Ottavio 1, +39 06 687 8637
