What to eat in Verona
Verona eats horse meat (braised as pastissada, dried into sfilacci) and boiled beef with pearà, a sauce of breadcrumbs, marrow and black pepper found nowhere else in Italy. The other half of the table is rice: Vialone Nano grown on the plain just south of the city.
Verona sits between a wet irrigated plain and a range of wine hills, and that geography explains the menu. The plain has grown rice for five centuries (Vialone Nano Veronese was the first Italian rice to win protected IGP status) and in the town of Isola della Scala risotto is less a dish than a local industry. The hills give Valpolicella, Soave and Bardolino, wines cheap enough at source that Veronese cooks put them straight into the pan.
The thing that startles most visitors is horse. In Verona it is an ordinary meat, sold in dedicated butcher shops alongside beef: braised for hours as pastissada, air-dried and shredded into sfilacci to eat raw over rocket, served as tartare. Local legend traces it to horses that fell outside the walls at the battle of 489 between Theodoric and Odoacer. The real reason is duller: the horse was a working animal of the plain, and at the end of its working life it went into the pot.
Venice is an hour away by train, but Verona is not a seafood city and has no cult of salt cod. What it has instead is boiled meat, polenta, mountain cheeses from the Lessinia plateau, freshwater fish trucked in from Lake Garda twenty minutes away, and pearà, the sauce served with boiled beef, made from breadcrumbs, beef marrow, broth and enough black pepper to make a point. The pepper was the point: it advertised that the household could afford it.
The dishes of Verona
Pastissada de caval
Horse meat marinated in Valpolicella with spices and vegetables, then braised until it collapses. It arrives with polenta or potato gnocchi, which soak up a very dark, very reduced sauce. If you are open to trying horse anywhere in Italy, this is the dish and this is the city: it is on almost every traditional menu, clearly labelled.
Bollito misto with pearà
Seven cuts of boiled meat (beef, tongue, head, hen, cotechino sausage) wheeled to your table on a steaming trolley. Pearà is made separately: breadcrumbs, melted beef marrow, broth and freshly ground pepper, cooked at a whisper for two hours. Strictly a winter dish; many osterias serve it only from November to February.
Gnocchi and the Gnocchi Friday
Verona gives potato gnocchi their own public holiday. On Venerdì Gnocolar, the last Friday of Carnival, a figure called the Papà del Gnoco parades through the San Zeno district holding a giant fork with a gnocco on it. The tradition dates to a famine relief effort in 1531. Eat them with butter and cheese, tomato, or pastissada sauce.
Risotto all'isolana
The risotto of Isola della Scala: Vialone Nano rice, hand-chopped pork and veal, butter, rosemary and a grating of cinnamon that catches everyone off guard. No fried onion base, no violent beating in of butter at the end: this rice absorbs broth while keeping its grains distinct. Tens of thousands of portions are served at the town's rice fair each autumn.
Risotto all'Amarone
Rice cooked with Amarone della Valpolicella, which stains it violet and leaves a bittersweet note of dried fruit, finished with butter and aged Monte Veronese cheese. It only works with real Amarone; made with any anonymous red it turns thin and sour. Order it in Valpolicella itself if you can.
Tortellini di Valeggio
Pasta rolled almost transparent, filled with meat and tied in a knot: the town of Valeggio sul Mincio calls them nodi d'amore, love knots, and has a legend about a nymph and a Visconti captain to explain it. Served in broth or with melted butter and sage. On the third Tuesday of June the town serves dinner on a single table laid the length of a medieval bridge.
Polenta with sopressa
Sopressa veneta is a large, soft, lightly aged salami, mild with pepper and garlic, cut thick and warmed on hot polenta until the fat begins to melt. Up on the Lessinia plateau it comes with fresh Monte Veronese cheese that pulls into strings. This is mountain-hut food rather than city restaurant food.
Polenta e renga
Smoked herring warmed over embers, filleted and served with polenta and olive oil. It is eaten on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, and Verona keeps the ritual with unusual stubbornness. The fish arrived through centuries of northern European trade up the river Adige: an inland city eating North Sea herring.
Lake Garda fish
Twenty minutes west of the city the cooking changes completely: grilled whitefish and lavaret, pike in a caper and anchovy sauce, tiny sun-dried lake sardines. It is dressed with Garda DOP extra virgin olive oil, one of the most northerly olive oils in the world, delicate and faintly almondy. Best eaten in the lakeside towns of Bardolino, Lazise or Torri del Benaco.
Sfilacci di cavallo
Horse meat that has been dried, lightly smoked and pulled into near-black threads. Veronese eat them raw over rocket with cheese shavings, stirred into risotto at the last moment, or on pizza. They are intensely salty and savoury: twenty grams per person is plenty.
Local products
Rice comes first. Vialone Nano Veronese IGP, grown on the spring-fed plain south of the city, has a short round grain that drinks broth while staying separate, and no substitute works properly in risotto all'isolana. Then the hills: Valpolicella (Amarone, Ripasso, sweet Recioto) to the north, Soave on volcanic slopes to the east, Bardolino along the lake, Custoza to the south-west. Lake Garda also produces Garda DOP olive oil, and the Lessinia uplands produce Monte Veronese DOP cheese, sold young and creamy or aged and brittle.
From the fields come radicchio di Verona IGP (long, red, eaten grilled or in salads from November) plus Verona IGP peaches in summer and white asparagus from Rivoli Veronese in spring. Horse butchery remains a genuine trade here, with specialist shops in the city and the surrounding towns. Sopressa salami is still more a village-shop product than a supermarket one, which is worth knowing when you want to buy some to take home.
Sweets and pastries
Pandoro is Veronese and has a birth certificate: on 14 October 1894 Domenico Melegatti patented a tall, eight-pointed star-shaped cake with no raisins and no candied peel. Before it there was nadalin (lower, drier, still star-shaped), which Verona bakeries still make in December and which many locals prefer to any industrial pandoro. In Bovolone, out on the plain, the Perbellini family has produced the Offella d'Oro since 1891, a cake that sits between the two.
Outside Christmas, look for torta russa, a puff pastry shell filled with crushed amaretti, almonds and custard, which despite its name was invented in Verona; the paper-thin caramelised sfogliatine of Villafranca; and brassadela, a plain ring cake made for dunking in wine. Carnival brings fritole and galani, the crisp fried ribbons dusted with sugar. Pasticceria Flego in the centre is the reliable address for nadalin.
Where to try them
Piazza delle Erbe is beautiful and now almost entirely a tourist market. For real shopping, Veronese go to Salumeria Albertini on Corso Sant'Anastasia, open since 1937, with a counter of mountain cheeses and Veneto salumi worth seeing even if you buy nothing, or to the weekly neighbourhood markets and the Campagna Amica farmers' stalls.
Antica Bottega del Vino, tucked in an alley behind Via Mazzini, has poured Valpolicella by the glass since 1890 and serves bollito and pastissada alongside it. The osterias under the arcades of Via Sottoriva, along the river, are the same idea in a rougher register and cost half as much. Trattoria al Pompiere, on Vicolo Regina d'Ungheria, hangs hams from the ceiling and is the right address for a salumi board and a plate of pearà.
By neighbourhood: San Zeno for gnocchi and family trattorias, Veronetta across the river for student prices, Borgo Trento for pastry shops. For lake fish, take the local train or bus to Lazise, Bardolino or Peschiera; for rice, go south to Isola della Scala.
When to go
February closes Carnival with the Bacanal del Gnoco and its Gnocchi Friday parades in San Zeno; Ash Wednesday means polenta and herring. April brings Vinitaly, Italy's biggest wine fair, which fills the city for five days: hotel prices double and restaurants need booking months ahead, so avoid those dates unless the fair is why you came.
The third Tuesday of June is the Festa del Nodo d'Amore in Valeggio sul Mincio, with four thousand people eating tortellini on a bridge. September and October belong to the Isola della Scala rice fair, the province's most serious food event. November brings Fieracavalli and the start of bollito and radicchio season, which runs through the cold months. December is pandoro and nadalin, with a Christmas market in Piazza dei Signori.
Food tours and classes here
Frequently asked questions
What food is Verona known for?
Pastissada de caval (horse meat braised in red wine, served with gnocchi or polenta), bollito misto with pearà sauce, and risotto made with local Vialone Nano rice, including the cinnamon-scented risotto all'isolana and risotto cooked in Amarone wine. Pandoro, the Christmas cake, was invented here in 1894.
Do people in Verona really eat horse meat?
Yes, routinely and openly. There are dedicated horse butchers in the city, and pastissada, tartare and dried sfilacci appear on ordinary trattoria menus, always clearly named. If you would rather not, say so when ordering: beef versions of most dishes exist and no one will be offended.
What is pearà?
A thick sauce of breadcrumbs, beef marrow and broth with a great deal of black pepper, simmered very gently for at least two hours. It is served hot in a separate bowl and eaten only with bollito misto, the mixed boiled meats. It exists in Verona and essentially nowhere else.
Is Verona a good base for food day trips?
Unusually good. Lake Garda and its fish restaurants are twenty to thirty minutes away, the Valpolicella wine hills start ten minutes north of the city, Soave is twenty minutes east, and Isola della Scala with its rice mills is half an hour south. All are reachable by regional train or bus.