The structure of an Italian meal

Breakfast is small, sweet and fast. A cornetto, plain or with custard or with jam, and a cappuccino or an espresso, taken standing at the counter of a bar, in about five minutes, for roughly €2.50-4. There are no eggs, no bacon and no savoury option in most bars; at home it is coffee and biscuits. The regional exception worth planning for is eastern Sicily in summer, where breakfast is a coffee or almond granita with a brioche col tuppo, and it is a genuinely substantial meal.

The clock is the part visitors underestimate. Lunch service runs roughly 12:30-14:30, with last orders often at 14:00. Then kitchens close: between about 15:00 and 19:30 most restaurants serve nothing at all, and the alternatives are a bar panino, a slice of pizza al taglio sold by weight, or a rosticceria. Dinner starts around 19:30-20:00 in the north and 20:30-21:30 in the south, and a restaurant that is empty at 19:45 in Naples is not a bad restaurant. Sunday lunch is the main meal of the week and needs a reservation, often days ahead in the countryside. Monday is the most common closing day, and since the fish markets do not run on Sunday, Monday is also the weakest day to order fish. Many places shut for two or three weeks in August; the weekly closing day, the riposo settimanale, is posted on the door.

Aperitivo occupies 18:30-20:30 and is a social slot rather than a course. You buy a drink (spritz, negroni, americano, vermouth, a glass of wine) and something to eat arrives with it at no extra charge: olives, crisps, focaccia, sometimes small plates. Expect €7-12 in a city. The Milanese apericena adds a buffet substantial enough to replace dinner, which is why it exists in a city that works late. Ordering a coffee at 19:00 in a bar full of people drinking spritz is possible but marks you out.

The venue vocabulary is the most useful thing to learn, because it predicts the bill. A bar is a coffee shop, not a pub: it opens at 07:00, sells coffee, pastries, panini and alcohol, and charges less at the counter than at a table. A trattoria is family-run, with a short menu, sometimes handwritten or recited, strictly regional cooking and moderate prices. An osteria was historically a wine place that also fed you, and today the word usually means much the same as trattoria, though ambitious restaurants sometimes borrow it, so read the prices, not the sign. A ristorante has a printed menu, a wine list, table service and higher prices. A pizzeria is generally evening-only, because a wood oven takes hours to reach temperature; at lunch you get pizza al taglio, sold by weight. An agriturismo is a working farm licensed to serve meals: under the national framework law and regional rules it must draw most of what it serves from its own production and the local area, usually offers a fixed menu, and normally requires booking, often only at weekends. Add enoteca (wine bar with food), gastronomia and rosticceria (prepared food to take away), forno (bakery, often selling pizza by the slice) and friggitoria (fried food).

What a real week looks like matters more than the ceremonial version. On a weekday most Italians eat one course at lunch, or a panino, or a piatto unico that combines protein and carbohydrate on one plate. The full antipasto-to-dolce sequence belongs to Sundays, holidays and restaurants, and portions across the whole menu are sized on that assumption. Children eat the same food as adults, in smaller portions. Bread appears without butter. The meal closes with an espresso, after dessert and not with it, and sometimes an amaro or a grappa, which is where the word ammazzacaffè comes from. Nobody orders a cappuccino, though nobody will stop you.