7 Quirky Food Rules You Should Follow When You're In Italy

Shortly after I moved to Italy in 2009, a group of Italian friends quizzed me on how differently Americans eat compared with Italians. They wanted me to affirm how trashy U.S. food is and how we eat all our meals out of paper bags. But when I replied, “Well, you all have a lot more rules around eating than we do,” I was met with nodding heads.

Mealtime in Italy can be a pretty rigid affair compared with American-style “eat while standing at the kitchen counter and scrolling on my phone” habits. Meals are at a set time. There are things you eat and don’t eat at breakfast, lunch or dinner, as well as foods you don’t mix and customs you don’t break.

Fabio Parasecoli, a professor of food studies at New York University, examines many of these social constructs in the 2022 book ” Gastronativism ,” and he said much of Italy’s fixation with food rules is linked to identity. “There’s a deep emotional connection with local food,” he said. “That food becomes symbolic of a community’s identity and social dynamics,” and therefore one’s personal identity, in both a local sense and a national sense, he said . And while Italy is changing with the times, adherence to tradition is still strong — largely as a way to cling to the very idea of Italianness. As Parasecoli put it, “Italians may like sushi, but they’ll never eat it for Sunday lunch with the family.”

So before you as a visitor show up at noon to your host’s home with a box of California rolls in hand, check out some of the most common food rules you’ll encounter in Italy, with a little explanation as to the (often sensible) reasoning behind each.

No Cappuccino After 11 A.M.

Yes, you can order a cappuccino after lunch or dinner and you’ll be served, but with a collective