Best Italian Restaurants in Rome 2026
By Lena Sørensen · Published · Updated
Rome's best Italian restaurants are not in Rome's prettiest squares. Spend a night on Piazza Navona and you will eat a €38 carbonara made with cream and bacon; walk fifteen minutes to Via dei Giubbonari and Roscioli serves the version Romans grew up on for €18. The eight rooms below skip the postcard addresses. Three Michelin stars on a Monte Mario hilltop, a two-star above the Tiber, a one-star with a Colosseum view, and four trattorie that have outlasted every food trend since the war.
Eight Roman Tables Worth the Reservation
Heinz Beck took over the Cavalieri rooftop in 1994 and earned the third star eleven years later. A German chef in Rome, cooking a refined modern Italian menu that respects the canon without imitating it. The fagottelli are the dish that built the kitchen's reputation: parcels of fresh pasta filled with carbonara cream that burst on the tongue. The wine list is the other reason to come. The cellar holds roughly 60,000 bottles, one of the deepest in Europe, with a vertical of Sassicaia that goes back to 1968.
Anthony Genovese was born in France to Calabrian parents and trained under Pierre Gagnaire before opening Il Pagliaccio with his sommelier wife Marion Lichtle in 2003. The kitchen reads Italian, but the technique is French and the seasoning travels. Genovese spent two years cooking in Asia and the menu carries miso, dashi, and Sichuan pepper without making a fuss about it. The room seats thirty across two small floors, and Lichtle's wine selections lean toward small Lazio and Piedmont producers most lists ignore.
Aroma sits on the rooftop of the Palazzo Manfredi with a Colosseum view no other restaurant in Rome can match. The amphitheatre fills three-quarters of the south-facing windows, lit at night by floodlights from the Via dei Fori Imperiali. Giuseppe Di Iorio has cooked here since 2013 and earned the star a year later. The food is modern Roman: oxtail ragù served over rigatoni rather than in the traditional vaccinara stew, artichokes alla giudia plated as a side to a Mediterranean turbot. The terrace seats forty.
The three Troiani brothers opened Il Convivio in 1988 and have run it for thirty-eight years without changing the format. Angelo cooks, Massimo runs the floor, Giuseppe pours. The dining room hides behind an unmarked door on a quiet vicolo off Piazza Navona: three small interconnected rooms with about twenty-five covers. The tagliolini with sea urchin is the test dish; the urchin comes from the Pontine Islands south of Rome and arrives the same morning. This is the table to book when you want one-star Roman cooking with no theatre.
Cristina Bowerman trained in San Francisco and Austin before opening Glass in Trastevere in 2004. The first one-star kitchen in the neighbourhood and still the only one. The room is a glass-and-steel modernist box on a medieval street, which used to read as provocation and now reads as a confident counterpoint to the trattorie around it. The ravioli with cacio e pepe filling is the dish to order; Bowerman flips the traditional sauce inside-out so the pasta itself carries the Pecorino and pepper, finished with shaved black truffle from December through March.
The Roscioli family ran the Giubbonari salumeria for thirty years before they put a restaurant counter inside in 2002. The format is the reason to come: thirty-five seats behind a meat-and-cheese vitrine, one seating per service, a 2,800-label wine list selected by Alessandro Roscioli, and a kitchen led by Nabil Hadj Hassen since 2011. The carbonara is the most-imitated dish in Rome and the only one that justifies the imitation. Guanciale cured in-house for sixty days, Pecorino di Fossa rather than Romano, and yolk-heavy. Book at twelve weeks for any Saturday.
Armando Gargioli opened this room in 1961 and his grandson Claudio runs the kitchen today. Three generations and sixty-five years cooking the same Roman menu from the same forty-eight-seat dining room directly beside the Pantheon. The cacio e pepe is the test: Pecorino Romano DOP from a single producer in Lazio, fresh tonnarelli rolled that morning, no cream, no butter. Booking opens exactly thirty days out at midnight Rome time. Refuse the offer of a Pantheon-view window seat — those are for tourists; the back room is where the regulars eat.
Twenty-eight seats, four pastas, no reservations for the first sitting, cash preferred. Da Enzo opened on Via dei Vascellari in 1980 and has not changed the menu since the late 1980s — Roman quattro pastas (carbonara, cacio e pepe, amatriciana, gricia), Wednesday gnocchi, fried artichokes from October to April, and a small list of Lazio wines under €30. The line forms at 18:45 for the 19:00 first seating; arriving any later means waiting until 21:30 for a second turn. The gricia is the dish; the guanciale is rendered until the pasta water emulsifies into a sauce the kitchen will not write down.
How to Pick the Right Roman Restaurant for Your Evening
Three-star occasion (La Pergola) is its own category. A once-a-trip booking, jacket required, expect five hours. Two-star tasting (Il Pagliaccio) is for the long conversation. One-star (Aroma, Il Convivio, Glass) is the smart middle: fine cooking without the formality of the top floor. Trattorie (Roscioli, Armando, Da Enzo) are where Romans eat; price drops, volume rises, the food is more memorable than the room.
Trastevere has Glass and Da Enzo within a six-minute walk and is the dinner-and-walk-home neighbourhood. The Centro Storico (Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Campo de' Fiori) holds Armando, Roscioli, and Il Convivio. Pack them into one trip. Aroma is east, by the Colosseum. La Pergola sits on Monte Mario, twenty minutes by taxi from anywhere central; budget the time both ways.
Roscioli and La Pergola are the hardest in the city; both open at ninety days and prime weekend slots disappear the same morning. Armando opens at thirty days at midnight. Aroma and Il Pagliaccio take three to four weeks for Saturday. Glass and Il Convivio take same-week for weekday lunches. Da Enzo does not take first-sitting reservations at all. Queue or arrive at 21:15 for the second turn.
Roscioli is the most accommodating of the trattorie for gluten-free pasta (one substitution per booking, ordered ahead). Il Pagliaccio's tasting can be rebuilt vegetarian with 72 hours' notice. La Pergola will write a bespoke vegan menu but expects a full week's lead time and the same €310 price. Da Enzo will substitute exactly nothing; this is a Roman family kitchen, not a kitchen for accommodations.