Authentic Italian Dining

You are looking for advice on authentic Italian food on a website where over 99% of contributors aren't Italian? Most people here probably haven't tried more than a handful of restaurants in any given city in Italy. It would be like asking on a Japanese website about authentic Chilean food in Santiago.
You are better off with websites locals use.
Italians use a lot
www.tripadvisor.it
www.ilmangione.it
www.thefork.it

If you see a restaurant that appears high in the ranks of all 3, chances are it's decent.

When I travel, I consider any meal I eat in that place to be authentic because I'm eating it there. Now I understand what you're asking is something else, but my perspective helps me have more fun wherever I wind up dining.

I always go with the rule of thumb to wander a few streets away from the heavily touristed areas to look for something that's a little less crowded. On his shows, Rick always says to stay away from restaurants with picture menus for the tourists as well.

I agree with checking the local review sites listed above. They may help steer you in the direction you want for your Italian dining.

Hope you have a wonderful time on your trip!

Italian cuisine encompasses twenty regions and millions of nonnas' recipes.

Get off the touristy streets and then follow your nose. One (or twenty) people may recommend a place, but how much do you trust their taste buds?

Look for Slow Food designated restaurants. These are places selected for serving quality traditional food with decent prices all over Italy. You can subscribe online at slowfood.it to find them, buy a Slow Food guide book or seek articles like this which list a few: http://www.charmingitaly.com/article/top-10-slow-food-restaurants-southern-italy

I am an Italian American and travel in Italy every year. The various regions are diverse in their cuisines and can often differ from town to town. Take bread for example because it is different in every region, as well. My favorite bread comes from the Lazio region south of Roma in Ariccia and Cecchina. I found the bread in Milano to be ok, but not as good as other places. My family comes from Calabria and their style is just ok. Now, keep in mind that my observations are subjective to my tastes.

If you see a restaurant with pictures of their dishes and indicating they speak many languages...skip it. In my experiences...generally, usually, but not always...the restaurants in the touristy areas are not so great. We look for places that are crowded with locals or just plain crowded. Since the arrival of Tripadvisor you can find good places to eat. Although, many restaurant proprietors, especially in Sicily, toldme personally they are afraid of the review process of Tripadvisor because anyone can post anything about a place. Often times competitors will post negative reviews about a restaurant. This is what many told me as I gabbed with them.

Anyway, if you are eating in Italy you are eating authentically, but some places are better than others. These are my reflections after traveling in Italy 20 times since 1980.

Buon viaggio,

'Authentic' is a slippery term. Most of those McDonalds around Italy are full of Italians. Just wander into a grocery store's freezer section and you'll see it's a different sort of thing than what we typically envision.

For Sorrento, I strongly suggest trying Inn Bufalito - http://www.innbufalito.com/
They have a store on the Piazza Tasso and the restaurant called Taverna Mediterranea is a few blocks away. Their homemade mozzarella is awesome!

And 'authentic' and 'best meal of the trip' may not be the same either.

I think the term 'unexpectedly great' always works for me. Such as, over the last two trips:

--this last March, on a bus trip from Sorrento, virtually nothing open yet for the season in a pretty-much-deserted Positano, found a tiny place on the upper level, LiGalli Bar by the Sponda bus stop, only because there was nothing else. What a find! A great antipasto, split a panini hamburger, and the freshest calamari on the Amalfi Coast, and we had sampled a lot of it!

--same trip, our previously-researched place in Rome was closed for construction. Walking back to our apartment at Campo de' Fiori, we saw a guy who looked like the owner standing out in front of a Sicilian place, smoking a cigarette. I struck up a conversation with him, found out his parents had a restaurant in Palermo. We dined there that night, and then another night before we left town. Awesome caponata, Sicilian-style pizza with anchovies, black olives and red pepper oil, and hands-down the best tiramisu I've ever had.

Bottom line is you just don't what you're going to find in your wanderings, guidebooks or not.

Yes, check restaurants recommmended online, but take reviews on popular sites like TripAdvisor with a grain of salt. It has become an extortion racket, and many Italian establishments are considering a class action lawsuit against TripAdvisor for aiding and abetting extortionists. A review on TripAdvisor has become like a "pizzo" (protection money extortet by the mafia). See one of the many articles below.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2623290/Give-free-meals-Ill-bad-review-TripAdvisor-Anger-blackmailers-using-online-ratings-website-extort-free-rooms-dinners-hotels-restaurants.html

I agree with Roberto. The restaurant people in Sicily were in clear, visible fear when I asked them for their business card so I could port a report on Tripadvisor after we returned home. One restaurateur in Catania explained that many competitors will posted phony negative posts about other eateries just to bash other places. The freebee shakedown is probably just a new innovation on the same old game.

Buon viaggio,

TripAdvisor reviews are also misleading because the reviewers in English are often inexperienced folk who don't know much about Italian food and/or haven't eaten out that much. The Italian language reviewers have a different set of biases but if they have added a lot of reviews, they are often worth reading.

go to a remote village in Tuscany far away from a tourist destination, and dine at the restaurant where the locals go. That is authentic Italian food

I do not read restaurant reviews as a rule, and Tripadvisor reviews may be a scam for all I know, but why can't "ordinary folk" pass judgement on food, and why presume that they do not eat out much?

Oh, and I agree with Jim.

The best places we ate in Rome we knew we were outsiders. No one spoke English, well not very good anyway, every one in the restaurant was speaking Italian but us. We were not "catered" to like in the tourist areas. But oh man, the food was good. It was around the corner from our AirBnb, in a residential neighborhood. Sorry I don't remember the name...and the pizza place down the street, omg...potato pizza is my new favorite.

I don't know much about restaurants in the cities you mentioned, but in my own Florence I know some, and some of the best aren't necessarily in the city center. Most locals tend to eat at those restaurants, which are not conveniently located for tourists (who tend to stay in the historical center) and are not rated by many viewers either because a lot of reviews on TripAdvisor are from visitors, and so they tend to concentrate on restaurants located in tourist areas. If you open a TripAdvisor map on the best restaurants in Florence, over 90% will be located in the city center, even though most Florentines will probably go to others out of the center.
The same is true elsewhere. For example when my Roman friends and family members take me to what they consider the best restaurants in Rome, they are rarely, if ever, in the city center near the tourist sights.
Jim's policy of going to towns outside the major city and ask the locals is a good strategy. Few of those restaurants will be rated on TripAdvisor since few tourists frequent those places and therefore the reviews will be few, but they will definitely be authentic and good.

My rule of thumb: The shorter the menu, the better the food.

This will be our 6th trip to Italy and we have always asked an Italian person working in a shop, at the Gelato stand, market etc. where they would or their family would go for a nice meal. Depending on whether we wanted to dine cheaply or expensively. It has very rarely failed us.