The food we ate

Part of a breakfast bar in Castelrotto. Aside from cappuccino, usually yogurt, a selection of fruits and granolas, fruit juices, meats and cheeses and fresh rolls. Occasionally scrambled eggs Breakfasts generally very good

My favorite evening drink

this was tasty. Enjoyed this in Walther Platz Bolzano



Lots of prosciutto in the form of panini and piadini (types of sandwiches we would grab for our train rides)

a menu standard at Florentine  restaurants. Gigantic steak. This was for Steve

Spaghetti Bolognese in a cute Garda restaurant that served us sweet vermouth. I drank Steve's too.

Standard pizza topping: le Quattro stagione (4 seasons) Pizzas were plentiful and cheap.

Ravenna had this tasty flat bread that they would make sandwiches out of. This was our meat appetizer platter. Good.



sweet roll assortment at our Ravenna place fresh from the bakery

Tirolean cuisine: Bolzano. This is carre affumicato: pork shank first smoked then boiled

My entrée: canederli: large beer dumplings containing speck, a kind of bacon. Tasty. I had these again in Castelrotto
The go to dessert in this region is strudel which I had in Castelrotto and later in Brenner

The weirdest dish we had (Steve's) in our Verona restaurant. It  translated as Veal with tuna sauce but looked like a giant pita with hummus. The veal was extremely thin.



At the same Verona place. The menu was chock full of equine dishes (horse and donkey) and organs (tripe) that I felt safer ordering something vegetarian. Forgot that soppressa is a meat. This is polenta with mushrooms and cheese.

Started buying these in grocery stores so I could have one late at night. Tiny little bottles of apericena...little apertivi

google edited tomatoes at the Rialto market

Our Verona menu: scary words: trippa, cavallo, asino Wasn't sure what puledro was. Too scared to find out.

Overall we ate well. Best meal for me was in a Florence neighborhood for lunch. Steve didn't want to go in because it looked very divey from the outside, but inside it was nice run by a nice grandmother type. As I really needed a bathroom at that moment, we were going to go there regardless. We ate in a pretty courtyard. I had ribboleta, black cabbage soup which is on every Florence menu and eggplant parmigiana which sounds boring but the eggplant was sliced so thin and it was so tasty .Also wine. I forgot what Steve had but he was happy with it.

Pasta of all kinds: Favorite, cappelletti(little hats), a specialty of Ravenna filled with creamy cheese.

 

Worst meal in Bologna, which is presumably the food capital of Italy. I had some sort of salad (as I hadn't had anything green in a while) full of bitter vegetables and funky tasting corn. The worst meal experience was some touristy place in Venice that added all these bogus charges to our bill including a sizeable conversion charge, which I refused to pay. It made us really hesitant to eat anywhere in Venice though we had a nice lunch in Burano. For our second dinner, we got stuff from the grocery store (and it was a nice dinner). We actually ate in a train station for our second lunch, which would be awful in the US but there, they have nice places.

 

Breakfasts were always at our hotel or b&b except for Florence where we'd go down the street to a nice café. I had an omelet one morning there. Good. Breakfasts were usually quite good. We ate a lot because sometimes we would have to skip lunch as that was when we were travelling. We went hungry sometimes.

 

Gelato: Love it. I would try different flavors at each place. The best Fig with nuts for only one euro in Garda.