Thanks to WineBerserkers for a great Italy Trip

I just returned from a 10 day trip to Italy (Venice, Florence, Tuscany and Rome) and I wanted to extend a heartfelt thanks for all of you who have contributed to the various Italy travel threads. I was in charge of organizing dinners and almost all of the restaurants I selected came from WB comments.
I also took advantage of the great comments on various wines (Conterno, Giacosa, Gaja, etc.). We were traveling with another couple who have been to Italy several times and they were wowed by our dining experiences.
I will do my best to pay it forward by posting some trip notes in the next week or so.

please do. I think we’ve settled on going back to Italy for our next trip abroad. Your experiences would be helpful

Italy fall of 2015 here…can’t wait to go back- look forward to your notes/impressions Phil

Neal, this helped me a lot when we went to Rome a couple of years ago. Rome Questions - Travel, Wine Tourism, and Restaurants Forum - WineBerserkers

Thanks Howard! I am sure I will plunder the archives here before we leave. When are you in bdx?

Phil, glad you had a great time and wonderful culinary experience. I’m traveling to Rome the first week in Feb., so any restaurant tips would be greatly appreciated.

In November.

As promised, here is the list of restaurants where we enjoyed dinner during our Italy trip. I will provide detailed descriptions of each in a subsequent posting. I can say that we did not have a bad or disappointing meal in any of them and I believe that each of them was fairly priced for the quality of the food, wine, service and ambience.
Venice - Osteria alle Testiere
Florence - La Giostra; Restaurante Cibreo
Siena area - Arnolfo (Colle di Val d’Elsa); Osteria da Divo (in the city of Siena); La Compagnia dei Vinattieri (in the city of Siena); Restorante Numero Unico (in the city of Siena); Made reservation but ended up cancelling - La Chiusa (Montefollonico)
Rome - AdHoc; Antico Arco; Crispi 19

The one restaurant that was not on our original list was "Restaurante Numero Unico - on our last night in Tuscany, we were pretty wiped from a hard day of wine tasting and were not up to a 45 minute drive to La Chiusa (which by all reports is a wonderful restaurant) and asked the host at our B&B if he could recommend a restaurant where we could book an early table (7-7:30). He obtained a reservation at Unico, which if not as notable in terms of ambience (modern and a little on the stark side) served us a fine meal at reasonable prices (probably the least expensive of the restaurants).

I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite as each had something different to offer. Arnolfo’s tasting menu was the most “over the top” in terms of the number of courses, the artistry of the chef’s presentation and the choreography of the service - but AdHoc offered a pre-dinner “truffle tasting” at its nearby truffle tasting room that was an experience that I am sadly unlikely to repeat unless I return to Rome and Antico Arco combined great food with a wait staff that was able to gauge the personalities of its diners and respond to them in a way that was great fun for us and Cibreo offered a modern twist on a number of classic dishes that incredibly creative and…
We are novices when it comes to Italian wines, but we very much enjoyed the wines we had with each meal (hard to go wrong with names such as Conterno, Giacosa and Gaja included in the mix).
One thing that stood out was how welcoming the staff was at every restaurant we dined at - whether we were dressed up or falling into our seats after an exhausting day of touring (and power shopping).

Hi Phil
Did you like Colle val d’Elsa? We were quite taken by the place, somewhere we’d only really chosen to go to by way of an out of town Decathlon store.
regards
Ian

Hi Ian,

The little we were able to see of it (we arrive after 9 in the evening) looked charming. My smartphone’s GPS did not love it - some of the streets are so close together that the GPS would think we were on the parallel street and start redirecting us. At least that is my excuse for our party mistakenly driving through a very narrow tunnel on a one-way street that ended in a series of metal bollards (much to the amusement of the locals who were hanging out in the doorways).