Food in Italy is a cultural experience, not like the latest hysteria of calculating carbs, proteins, searching for bio slogans, fighting for or against animals. In Italy family traditions and local celebrations are usually food-related.

From morning to late evening, I hear Italians talking about what they have already eaten and what they are still going to eat. Food is the most popular topic. When my Lithuanian mom calls, she starts with, “What is the weather like?”  When Adriano’s mom calls, she asks, “What did you eat today?”

Sometimes I walk with Adriano late in the evening, discussing something completely unrelated, and then all of a sudden he’s like, “You know, that thing yesterday at lunch was fantastic”. Or the second sentence after waking up in the morning is, “Let’s do pasta with zucchini for dinner today”.

You get my point. Food is very important, always top of the agenda.

So how is Italian food?

It is delicious, simple, very fresh and mostly healthy. Italians cook a lot at home. The most significant thing is that it is always freshly prepared. It does not have to be a masterpiece but it will be fresh.

The main misunderstanding which I discover from foreigners and my own guests is the expectation that the famous Italian cuisine has to be sophisticated, somehow complicated and innovative to prepare. “So is it just pasta and pizza?” I hear people asking. The most common daily dishes in Italy are very simple.

I am sharing my experience of what I see and how I live in Rome, how we eat at home. Italy varies greatly among regions, cities, and families.

When to eat?

Italians have strict rules about when they eat, and what is consumed. If you are a tourist in a small town, it is very likely that you will find restaurant doors closed when you are hungry. On the other hand, if you are not that strict about mealtimes, in touristic locations like Rome, you can benefit a lot from finding a free table in a less crowded place if you come a bit earlier before the busiest time.

In Rome, I find breakfast time to be the most flexible. Some people eat at home immediately after they wake up (around 7 am), others grab a coffee and cornetto in a bar before entering the office (about 9 am), and at the weekend it can be any time from  7—11 am.

Lunch is at 1 pm; dinner at 8 pm. No matter when you have breakfast, lunchtime does not move. It does not matter if you have for some strange reason missed lunch, dinner time does not move either. I do not know families with little kids around here, but I have read that Italian parents apply the same rule to them – if they skip one meal when everybody eats, mum does not jump to it to feed the kid till the next mealtime arrives. It sounds harsh to me but would explain why Italians, in general, so little disciplined in many other areas, are extremely strict in their agenda about mealtimes.

Breakfast

Breakfast in Italy is always sweet. It can be a glass of hot milk with biscuits at home, or a piece of cake, even ice-cream if you wish, but no eggs, ham, cheese, salty sandwiches or porridge. Cornflakes are finding their way onto family breakfast tables. However, so far you would laugh at the lack of choice in the supermarkets compared to what is available elsewhere. At breakfast, fresh orange juice, water and all sorts of coffee are the most popular drinks. Tea does almost not exist in Italy.

Breakfast is very important, but the smallest meal of the day. My work colleague from England was shocked, “How do they survive till 1 pm with just one cornetto (an Italian word for croissant)?” Indeed, not only compared to a ‘full English breakfast’, but also in many other countries people tend to eat much more for breakfast than in Italy. If you stay at Bed & Breakfast in Italy, expect breakfast to be very small.

A customary daily habit is to eat breakfast in a bar. You get whichever coffee you’d like and a cornetto which is delicious and very cheap. The regular price is 0,80 EUR for coffee and 0,80 EUR for a cornetto. New diet trends have kicked in also in Italy. So now in advanced bars, you can also find vegan, no gluten, no sugar and other “no something” versions of sweets.

To the bar at 7 am?

“Bar” in Italy, first of all, means a place for a coffee, a cornetto in the morning and a sandwich (“panino”) later. Every morning, thousands of bars all across Italy fill up with people. For me, this is one of the biggest daily pleasures. It would not be Italy if I didn’t hear the sound of cups and coffee machines in the morning. As soon as I land in Rome the aroma of espresso tickles the nose.

Coffee bars typically are family businesses, it is much more of a personal relationship than visiting global coffee chains elsewhere. In Italy there are no coffee bar chains whatsoever. We chat, share news, complain and laugh together. It is not just a coffee, but a social meeting. I leave my morning bar in high spirits.

Most visitors to the bars arrive early in the morning and after lunch for the second most popular coffee time during the day. A bar is not a place for alcoholic drinks in the evening as in other countries. Once I asked the owners of my most frequently visited bar in Rome, why they keep lots of alcohol bottles above the coffee machine. They said that it is for tourists and very rarely would somebody take a shot of digestive after lunch. For a cocktail in the evening, Italians go to “aperitivo” places, but I will come back to this later.

Very important to know for tourists, that in Italy most people drink coffee fast, standing at a bar.First of all, you pay at the cash desk, which is always separate, then approach the bar and show your receipt for the coffee. There is an extra charge if you sit down at a table and order from there.

In “normal” bars, table service would cost 30% extra, but in touristic centres you can easily pay three times more. And if the bar has some tables inside and others on a nice terrace outside, sitting outside would be the third and most expensive option. In case you start to think that simple things are complicated in Italy, welcome! You start to understand the culture!

Lunch

It is always at 1 pm. At weekends, when people are most likely to be late meeting up, it may start at 2 pm. If you want to have a business meeting or a conference call, do not ever disturb Italian people between 1–2.30 p.m.

So on those very rare weekend days when we get out of the house only by 11 am, it would be quite usual for us to skip breakfast or take just one tiny biscuit, so as not to ruin our appetite for lunch, which will be just round the corner.

No pizzas or pizzerias are open for lunch (exceptionally in the centre in Rome you can find some, but these are only for tourists). Italians eat pizzas only in the evenings. It is one of those rules which I have never understood. Though it does not have to be understood. It is not about right or wrong, or the reasoning behind it. It is all about traditions.

For example, once I was eager to find a logical explanation as to why cappuccino is served only in the morning. (If you want to disgust an Italian, order a cappuccino after a steak in the evening.) Somebody told me it is because of digestion, meaning that dairy products are not suitable for digestion when consumed after midday. It sounds logical, however Italians have no problem with ice-cream, sauces with cream, mozzarella or parmiggiano even before going to bed.

Aperitivo

Just before jumping to dinner, there is a new trend of “aperitivo” or “apericena” worth mentioning. It is a fixed price offer, which includes one drink (most usually a glass of wine, Spritz cocktail or a beer) with a snack from 6–7 pm. Perfect for meetings after work.

A more extended version of aperitivo is called “apericena”, which is just arriving in Rome, but I found it extremely popular in Milan. Apericena is a conjunction of two words aperitivo + cena (dinner in Italian), meaning that a restaurant serves a lot of buffet food and you can refill your plate as much as you want. Often they serve one or two hot pasta dishes as well.

Romans are still rather traditional and prefer a regular dinner with hot dishes freshly prepared when ordered. People cook at home a lot (I really mean A LOT!) – going to restaurants is not that expensive in Rome when you know where to go, though cooking at home would still be the most popular choice.

Dinner

Very similar to lunch, but now pizzas are also an option. Pizzas are still cooked in huge wooden ovens which obviously are not found in apartments. In Rome, pizzerias (restaurants for pizzas) serve only pizzas, and other types of restaurants do not serve pizzas.

Dinner in Rome is at 8 pm.

What Italians eat for big meals

For lunch and dinner, a starter, first dish and a second dish for one meal used to be traditional, but these days hardly anybody still eats three dishes at one meal. Now people usually take two or just one dish, followed by, or not, a little sweet and coffee.

Starters

In Italian “antipasto” differ depending on the main meal – pizza, fish or meat. Before a pizza people usually take bruschetta, suppli (a rice ball made with tomato sauce and mozzarella), or some little fried snacks. Before a fish dish, it would be mussels with black pepper or seafood salad. Before anything else, a snack of ham with melon, cured meats, or vitello tonnato (a thin slice of lamb with tuna sauce).

The first dish

It is pasta, lasagne or risotto. Risotto is not very popular in Rome. It is more usual in the northern regions in Italy. In the North you would also find some types of soup, which in general are not popular further south.

There are hundreds and probably thousands of sauces for a pasta dish. At home, everything is prepared freshly, even the tomato sauce. It goes without saying that our fridge has never seen ketchup or mayonnaise.  I have never bought butter in Italy either. Olive oil is king, although sometimes béchamel sauce is used for pasta dishes.

Adriano cooks at home the most, and I find it quite usual that men know how to cook and like doing so in Italy. At home we do not follow any diet and calculate absolutely nothing of what we consume. I naturally follow the traditions of my personal Italian cook.

Most pasta sauces are made from vegetables, but they can also contain meat, fish and seafood. Though I have never seen pasta with chicken. It is the sauce which gives pasta its flavour. However, there are around 179 types of different pasta. What is very confusing for me, is that they all have different names on menus.

I was not born in a “pasta culture”, so different sizes and shapes of pasta make little difference to me.  Adriano (a real Roman) says that it is the choice of pasta that differentiates a dish. There is a “right” and “wrong” type of pasta for the various sauces. At this point, I feel like I am entering a danger zone, but from what I have understood so far, the first rule is to choose the bigger type of pasta for a sauce containing large pieces of vegetable or meat.

Golden rule is pasta “al dente”. It means that it has to be a little hard. The worst mistake you can make for an Italian is to overcook pasta. Italians time every minute following the instructions on the pack. Most often pasta, which is always boiled separately in salted water (with nothing else), is poured into the sauce for the last 2 minutes to be finished off and mixed altogether.

When people come to our house, or we go to Adriano’s parents, the meal can be prepared in advance, but the pasta itself is always cooked only after guests arrive. Because once it is ready, it has to be eaten immediately.

The second dish

One of the most surprising things for me in Italy was the second dish. At home, it is usually just a piece of meat. Without literally anything. In restaurants now you can often find side dishes to order. Even so, side dishes most likely will be minimal and not a half plate of potatoes or salad as I was used to before. At home, the second dish most often is a small piece of lean meat without any side dish.

When all three dishes are prepared at home, I would expect the starter and also the second dish to be the smallest, and the first dish to be the richest (pasta or risotto).

Drinks

For a drink, pure table water would be the most usual. Wine is trendy but in my experience far from what many people think of in Italy. In our family, we do not drink wine with every meal, and when we do, it is one glass each per family gathering.

Another thing that is not daily in my environment, but something that still sounds very Italian to me is to drink a little “digestive” after a meal. It is how and when Italians drink the famous Limoncello. You drink 30 millilitres of it just before leaving the table. They say that it helps digestion.

I have never seen people drinking lemonade, coca-cola or juices at lunch or dinner. Maybe it is more usual for kids.

Sweets

It would be quite common for us after lunch with family (at home or in a restaurant) to go out together for a little walk to another place for sweets and coffee. It can be a “gelateria” for an ice-cream or “pasticerria” for a piece of cake and coffee. It is not done to eat sweets daily and is essential to note that in Italy small (I mean tiny by the standards of some countries) portions of cakes or ice-cream are most popular.

After many travels, I conclude that it is very rear to find a culture of delicious sweets in the world. At the moment, nothing else, but Italy and France come to my mind. Enjoy it while you are there.

How not to gain weight in Rome

Sometimes people ask me how much weight I have gained in Rome. Opposite, I have lost it. The first thing to mention is that what tourists eat and how much they eat is different from Italian families. You sit in the centre of Rome, take a big portion of lasagne, pasta with carbonara sauce or another rich Roman dish, then go for a pizza in the evening, come home with some extra kilos and wonder how fat you would get if you stayed in Rome forever. But you would not!

First of all, these are not everyday dishes and not eaten on the same day by the same person. Second, at least in my environment, portions are small at home. Third, even if your lunch and dinner are quite big, Italians do not eat between meals. Last but not least, I find Italian cuisine very lean, free of all kinds of fat except virgin olive oil. Though you get the impression that ice-cream and cakes are everywhere, they come in small portions and are not consumed daily.

I also find older Italian people are careful in choosing their meals, limiting the famous pasta and doing lots of sport. I bless every tourist enjoying Roman cuisine to the fullest. Just saying, that in my experience, this is not how Romans eat daily.

Adriano summarizes the secret of not eating fattening food in a simple way – no sugar in anything but occasional sweets and no butter whatsoever.

In the end, here is the view:

Do what Italians do a lot – walk! Italians are generally not fat. Healthy food and a lot of physical activity explain the trend. Italy is made for walks, climbing, swimming and skiing – locals of all ages do these a lot. I find fitness centres almost on every corner in Rome. Hundreds of them.

Whether it is Rome with its long promenades, or Venice, going up and down the bridges all day long, enjoy the walk and eat a lot!