Yes, this is actually a list of rules for how and when to eat bread in Italy. You would think it would be straightforward, but eating bread in Italy is a topic that is almost as fraught as the whole ‘when to drink cappuccino’ thing. Last week, during our Week in Umbria tour, this seemed to be the most perplexing topic for our guests: When, how and why to eat bread? So I thought I’d answer some of those questions right here, right now.
Like many things in Italy, there are rules. And then there are exceptions to the rules.
1. Bread is meant to be eaten with other food. This means that when you sit down in a restaurant, the bread basket that arrives at the table is not meant as a pre-dinner snack. The bread is there to eat with your food (see rule #4below) And please do not ask for olive oil and a small bowl to dip it in. This is just not an Italian thing. And it is especially not an Italian thing to add balsamic vinegar to the bowl. Why? Because why on earth are you filling up on bread and olive oil even before the meal arrives? And that vinegar? It will totally ruin your taste buds for the rest of the meal.(Don’t worry, this is the nearest thing to a rant in this post)
2. Exception to Rule # 1: If the bread is toasted in the kitchen, and then drizzled with olive oil and brought to the table then, by all means, eat it. In this case, it is considered an antipasto, called bruschetta, and you can go ahead and eat enjoy it with fear of breaking any laws.
3. Another Exception to Rule # 1: If the bread is in the form of focaccia or pizza bianca, and you buy it by the slice in a bakery, then not only can you eat it on its own, you can also eat it while walking around (usually another no-no)
4. Bread is meant to be eaten with food, but NOT with pasta. Pasta is a starch, so do not eat bread (a starch) with pasta(another starch.) Only eat your bread with either your non-pasta first course (soup or antipasto), your main course (meat) or your side dish (vegetable). You are also allowed to, and expected to, use bits of your bread to help any non-pasta food up onto your fork.
5. Exception to Rule # 4 : If there is sauce left at the bottom of your plate of pasta then yes, you can use your bread to soak it up. In Rome, this is called ‘fare la scarpetta’ and is particularly necessary when ordering pasta Amatriciana which is always heavily sauced. If you’re at a very fancy restaurant or dinner party, then think twice before doing it. But if other Italians are doing it, then swipe away.
6. While it would seem like Italians don’t stack up their carbs (see rule # 4) feel free to order a fried rice ball or even a bruschetta before you order a pizza. In fact, it’s kind of like a rule that you should order more carbs before your pizza, particularly fried ones.
7. Don’t throw away old bread. Italy is a country that has lived through two world wars, and the older generation will still cringe if you throw away a half consumed loaf of bread that has gotten stale. Instead? Make one of the many recipes that use up dried bread.
8. If you’re traveling in central Italy you may complain that the bread is tasteless because it contains no salt. Get over it. And also re-read rule # 1. Remember, bread is meant to be eaten with the food. And the food in some of these regions is very salty.
9. Italians aren’t big on toast in the morning. Instead, they prefer a type of hard pre-baked toast-shaped thing called fette biscottate. I can’t even begin to explain the charms of this Italian breakfast food to you since there are none. It’s a mystery to me.
10. The Breadstick exception: In theory, these too are supposed to be eaten with a meal. But really? Almost everyone nibbles on them before the food arrives.
For more advice on how and what to eat in Italy you might be interested in my book Eating Rome: Living the Good Life in the Eternal City.
I have also published a series of apps, with my favorite restaurants in cities in Italy including Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Torino and more. Eat Italy is a free apps and is available on iTunes. Some cities are free and others are available as in-app purchases.
great post!
Strange, I spent the summer of 2012 in Italy and we dipped bread into small bowls of olive oil with balsamic vinegar all the time. Things must have changed a lot since 2012!
They haven’t changed. Restaurants never offer small bowls of olive oil, and NEVER would offer balsamic for dipping. This perhaps means that you were at restaurants that catered to tourists, or that you asked for the bowl. Balsamic would never ever be offered for dipping before a meal since it completely ruins the palette for anything else that comes after. Mixing the two, and then dipping bread in, before a meal is generally something that horrifies most Italians.
Ive been to Italy and I dont know about “horrified”. …lol. stop over reacting. People can eat their food however they wish to do so. Move on.
Oh, well, hey, if you’ve been to Italy then I’m sure you are an expert. Also, are you a writer too?
No amount of vinegar will ruin my palette if I will to eat Italian cuisine. That’s how good the food here…😃
4) is actually a bit larger, and includes the risotto and polenta eaters as well. ‘Ignore the bread with your primo, as it’s too much starch on starch’, is how we tell it.
Unrelated, but still worth mentioning is that a lot of Italy makes bread not really worth the calories, as though it were baked to be shipping and packaging material. It’s the hard durum wheat-based breads of the south that most think of as great ‘Italian bread’. This needs to come from the south too, rather than just be called ‘pan pugliese’, ‘pane lucano’, etc. Ask a northern about great bread in Italy. It’s not created equal.
To each his own! And spoken like a true southerner. Unfortunately there is bad bread being made today all over Italy, not just in the north. And I’ve fantastic bread in the north as well as the south. It’s industrially made bread that’s bad, and is becoming all too common, sadly.
Loved this! “Fare la Scarpetta” is an action I grew up with. There is nothing more comforting than dragging a crisp heel of bread through the remnants of sauce on the bottom of a bowl whispering, “don’t leave me here.”
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all bread is not created equal; that it is endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable aromas and tastes that among these are savory, herbaceous, and the pursuit of perfection………………Thomas Jefferson
And……………Never to yield to the plaintive cry of the tourist! “Hey waitress, more rolls!!”
I love the Hamilton reference. Its Pure Genius! also i found this article very informing for preparing on my future trip to italy.
I have mentioned many of your ‘rules’ to friends, and they just don’t believe me! Thanks for the confirmation…..will eliminate many future arguments.
Italy bread, in any form, is delicious!
Unsalted Umbrian bread is the best is the world! Bruschetta made with artisan American bread just is not the same not as yummy! Thank you for putting the world to rights about unsalted bread.
So interesting, the rules of eating. Have you done a post on the correct drinking of cappuccino?
I’d like to come on your Umbrian tour next year. I’m having trouble with my computer so can’t send you an email by clicking on the link. If you post yours as a response then I will be able to write to you.
Hi Barbara, I have your email address here, so will send you information about the Umbria tour. Would be glad to have you! I thought I had written about drinking coffee in the past, but I guess I haven’t on the blog! It’s part of the coffee chapter in my last book, Eating Rome. But good idea, I’ll post it here!!
Does anyone know what bread is the one at the Irishman movie? The one they dip in the wine
Thank you!
Lovely post. Who knew there were all these rules! But can you blame anyone for reaching out for a piece of warm bread when that basket is put in front of you? Break the rules, I say! 🙂
In Italy it’s almost never warm (I guess that’s another rule?)
What a fun post. I particularly cracked up at the fette biscottate jibe 🙂 !!
I do say, my inlaws sometimes put bread at table WITH a pasta meal. I’ve always found the starch and starch combo to be odd. It’s meant for the secondo of course. Which may involve potatoes. Potatoes, pasta and bread in a meal. Ought to be an Italian no-no, yet they are italian…
Bread and potatoes is always ok. Potatoes are a vegetable.
Loved this post! Good to have all of the rules to reread. This may be one of the main reasons why the Mediterranean food plan works..
Absolutely. The “Mediterranean Diet” only works with the rules. Otherwise, you’re just throwing olive oil and parmesan on everything.
I like to order a plate of charcuterie (Italian name escapes me right now) and have that with some bread, especially when we’ve been in Italy for 3-4 weeks and I want a change from pasta, pizza, grilled meat, etc. Last stop for us is usually Venice; as much as I love seafood, my husband is allergic to scaled fish, even gets queasy when I am eating it, so my fall back order used to be pasta e fagioli.
Question: are the artichokes at places like Da Giggetto available year round? Next trip will probably be January-February. Thanks!
Yes, the artichokes are available year-round, since they import them from greenhouses in France. But they aren’t good year round. But February you may start to see the beginnings of Italian ones, from the south.
Great post! My grandmother used to make bread for us when she would come over. My mother did not like it and I LOVED it. I found out later that it was made without salt..even in the 1960’s and 70’s. That is the way she made it still. Fast forward to a trip to Italy 4 years ago. I still loved the bread made without salt!
Nice post. My mom called “fare la scarpetta” instead… “la passegiatta in piazza” 🙂
Love that!!
I’m so glad our questions and errors last week inspired this 🙂 Pre-trip reading for all of your guests!
Yes, I’m starting a new series: answering your questions before they are asked. 😉
LOL! As a member of the most recent tour I can attest to ALL of the above! It’s just way too much bread. It’s definitely best when soping up that last bit of whatever sauce is left….
But the point of this post is that it is definitely NOT too much bread, if eaten correctly. I guess I should emphasize that Italians really don’t eat more than one slice of bread per meal.
Something I learned when living in Italy was that Italians don’t use bread plates. You may be served bread in a basket, but once you take a piece of bread or roll, it goes on the table.
True!!!
Awesome post, I didn’t realize the unspoken mantras of eating bread in Italy. 🙂 Is gluten free bread easily available there? Gluten makes me bloat but it also may be because I overeat it. Happy Friday!
Gluten free pasta is more and more available, but bread is still difficult to find. Especially in a restaurant. They will usually have prepackaged crackers,but they can’t really keep fresh bread on hand.
What a great set of rules! It continues to amaze me how many rules the Italians have for eating and drinking! 😀 Oh, I just remembered another bread rule: never take a bite out of a large piece of bread when you are at the table. Tear a small piece off and put it in your mouth. My Italian husband often tells our children off for “not eating their bread properly”!
That is true! It’s actually true in most of Europe, to always break a small piece off.
A friend in Rome once told me that if I wanted to “fare la scarpetta” in polite company, I should rip off a small piece of bread and use my fork to swipe it in the sauce. Never was able to develop the patience to do that. I just use my hand and hope no one is looking…
On dipping bread in olive oil, which I agree is an awful custom, someone told me it was actually a Spanish thing, common with tapas, although I have no idea if it’s true…
Yes, I’ve seen Italians do that with their fork. I think practice makes perfect! I’ve never seen olive oil dipping in Spain, but I’m no expert there.
Do you do any private tours in January?
Yes, we do. It just depends on the date. Send me an email and we can see if we can work something out.
Just as our mother taught my brother and me when we were young. I love ALL your posts, Elizabeth.
I will adhere to the Cappuccino rule, but no can do on this list of 10 bread rules (and I know them to be true, but I can’t help myself). I am perfectly happy to be the ugly American on this one because the bread (like every other thing) in Italy is SO DAMN GOOD!
I eat like a condemned man when I am in Italy because, who knows when my next visit will be? Please don’t judge too harshly. I promise, if I move there someday, I will follow every rule.
I’m at work-ok, too lazy.. to look it up, but wasn’t there a salt tax that folks in Tuscany rebelled against, hence saltless bread? Personally I don’t mind it as long as I have a nice piece of salty cheese with it—
Great post, had a good chuckle, but not too loud–at work and all that….:)
Good to know that there are rules / etiquettes for eating bread…….
Thanks for this fun post. You have really cleared up some burning questions, and thinking back to my previous trip to Italy, I probably committed some bread-eating faux pas. Oh well!
When visiting my relatives in Sicily (we’re from a small town just south of Messina), my uncle made bread in his outdoor oven, then his wife would soak the bread in olive oil and then rub with both sugar and salt–it was something I had never had before. Is this traditional? My grandparents here never did it for me as a child, nor was my father familiar with it…..
Thanks!
I’ve never heard of that, but it sounds wonderful!!
I made the mistake of asking for olive oil for my bread when I was in Italy and they treated me like a complete freak show. The waiter bought a massive bottle from the kitchen and slammed it down on my table. All the staff looked annoyed at me. Eventually he asked for it back because “the chef need his oil back to cook for the other customers”.
I loved Italy, but I found the snobbishness surround food and coffee quite tedious…
I’m sorry that you had a bad experience. But to me, it sounds like you actually had an authentic experience. If you went into a restaurant and they happily gave you some oil for your bread, then I would say that the restaurant is catering to tourists. It’s not snobbishness at all. It’s just the Italians following their own traditions. Just because you are in the habit of having olive oil with your bread, doesn’t mean that every restaurant in the world should be prepared to give it to you. For instance if you had a restaurant in the USA and a client came in, and asked for milk to dip his bread in before his meal, don’t you think the you would find that odd? Even if that client came from another country that always had bread dipped in milk before meals? I think to call adapting to local traditions tedious is kind of negating the point of travel.
I like what you said about eating bread with other food to have an authentic Italian dining experience. My sister has been telling me about how she wants to experience foods from other cultures in the coming months. I’ll share this information with her so that she can look into her options for restaurants that can help her with this.
I just read this since I am hosting a dinner party inspired by “The Italian Table”.
I can’t wait to share some of the facts with everyone as well. I know they will make great conversations.
Thank you!
Have fun!!!!
And the most important thing to remember when eating bread in Italia: Be in Napoli.
Wow. What a bunch of rubbish! Eat your bread however you like it. If someone else chooses to be offended by your eating habits that’s on them 😂. Don’t let someone else’s hurt feelings (which they actually chose to inflict on themselves) keep you from doing things the way you want to do them. You only have one life and to live it for other people is a waste.
I think you have misunderstood the meaning of this post. I agree with you that you can certainly do and eat anything you want to where ever you are. However, I think it’s important to understand the food culture of the place you are visiting, don’t you? That way, when, for instance, the waiter hesitates to bring you more bread with your pasta, you can better understand it. I’m not sure where you are from, but I’m sure there are cultural traditions that are followed? And that you would expect visitors to respect?
Thanks for the advice about bread. I found the writing style to be pompous and bombastic considering the subject matter but it was interesting. Thanks
I’d love to see your published writing, to see how you write for your readers.
But, the bread here is so so good! I can’t resist, sitting at a table and the bread comes and I love the bread! It’s like torture to me to follow this rule, but I’m a tourist so maybe I get a rolled-eye pass?