Italian cuisine
culinary traditions of Italy
Italian cuisine is a Mediterranean cuisine consisting of the ingredients, recipes, and cooking techniques developed in Italy since Roman times, and later spread around the world together with waves of Italian diaspora. Significant changes occurred with the colonization of the Americas and the consequent introduction of potatoes, tomatoes, capsicums, and maize, as well as sugar beet—the latter introduced in quantity in the 18th century. Italian cuisine is one of the best-known and most widely appreciated worldwide. In 2025, Italian cuisine was listed as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO.
The cuisine includes deeply rooted countrywide traditions as well as diverse regional dishes. Many dishes that were once regional have proliferated with variations throughout the country. Italian cuisine is one of the most popular and copied around the world. Italian cuisine has left a significant influence on several other cuisines around the world, particularly in East Africa, such as Italian Eritrean cuisine, and in the United States in the form of Italian-American cuisine.
A key characteristic of Italian cuisine is its simplicity, with many dishes made up of few ingredients, and therefore Italian cooks often rely on the quality of the ingredients, rather than the complexity of preparation. Italian cuisine generated an estimated €251 billion in global foodservice revenue in 2024, according to Deloitte. Over the centuries, many popular dishes and recipes have often been created by ordinary people more so than by chefs, which is why many Italian recipes are suitable for home and daily cooking, respecting regional specificities, privileging only raw materials and ingredients from the region of origin of the dish and preserving its seasonality.
“Italian cuisine” enters the record as culinary traditions of Italy. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Italian, cuisine and culinary can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Italian cuisine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.