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ITALIAN HABITS

Dressing up and slowing down: The unwritten rules of an Italian Sunday lunch

Sunday lunches are a cornerstone of Italian life and society, but if you've been invited to one what exactly should you expect?

Published: 23 February 2024 09:06 CET
Updated: 24 February 2024 11:44 CET
Rome, restaurant
Interior view of a Rome restaurant. Photo by Anna Church on Unsplash

Sunday lunch is an important tradition in many countries, but Italy’s pranzo della domenica takes things to another level.

Far from being just a meal, it’s a key part of Italian society providing families and friends with an opportunity to come together and celebrate their bond over food and wine.

READ ALSO: Three meals a day on schedule: Why do Italians have such fixed eating habits?

If you’ve been living in Italy for some time, or have relatives in the country, chances are you’ve already attended a traditional Sunday lunch. But if you’ve just been invited to your first, what can you expect?

Everyone dresses up

You may think of Sunday lunch as a relaxed situation where participants are more or less free to wear whatever they want as long as they look half presentable. 

Fashion-conscious Italians however aim to look smart even on occasions when none but close family members or friends are present, just to make una bella figura, or ‘a good impression’.

It’s not at all rare for Italians to turn up to Sunday lunch with fancy outfits and flashy accessories. Keeping this in mind when picking out your own attire may well spare you some funny looks from across the table later on.

You’re there for the long haul

Think of a very, very long meal, then add a couple of hours, and you may get close to the average length of an Italian Sunday lunch. 

Pranzi domenicali are no brief business and it’s not just because of the unconscionably large quantities of food being served, but also because Italians like to take things slowly, and try to extend social occasions for as long as they can. 

Overall, it’s not rare for a Sunday lunch to last three, four or even five hours in some areas of the country.

Restaurant, Campania

Customers sat at a restaurant in Ravello, Campania. Photo by Sterlinglanier on Unsplash

Food to feed an army

Starter (antipasto), first course (primo piatto), second course (secondo) and sides (contorni), cheese or fruit, and dessert – all served in generous portions. 

That’s the very minimum you can expect from a Sunday lunch.

READ ALSO: How many different types of pasta are there in Italy?

The jury is still out on exactly how Italians can get through food marathons of this scale on a regular basis, but what’s certain is that you’ll find it hard to keep up with them, at least for the first couple of outings.

If you can’t finish your food, don’t worry: an overly dramatic non ce la faccio piu’ (literally, ‘I can’t take it anymore’) will usually get you off the hook.

The digestivo ritual

By the time lunch comes to an end, you’ll likely find yourself wondering how many working days your body’s going to take to process all of the food you’ve just eaten.

Luckily, you’ll get a chance to give your stomach a helping hand by drinking a digestivo, a highly alcoholic, intensely flavoured liqueur which Italians swear by when it comes to digestion issues.

READ ALSO: Are Italians really drinking less wine?

Whether it is an amaro, a limoncello, or some fiery grappa, the digestivo will be served neat in a small shot glass (but shouldn’t be guzzled in one go like a shot).

You may hear some Italians refer to the digestif as ammazzacaffe’ (or ‘coffee killer’) as it generally deadens the caffeine buzz of the espresso consumed at the end of lunch.

Pennichella time

Sunday lunches in Italy can be a bit hard on people with low noise tolerance (Italians aren’t exactly known for being soft-spoken, and that tends to get worse after a few glasses of red).

But you can generally expect the chatter to fizzle out pretty quickly after the last round of digestivi as most people drift into the quintessential pennichella – a post-lunch snooze revitalising body and soul.

You can either join the others in the land of Nod, or sit back and enjoy the longed-for silence.

Do you think we’ve missed anything? Let us know in the comments below.

Member comments

  1. Three decades in (northern) Italy, married to an Italian wife and previously a long term Italian girlfriend. I often read about these mega Italian family Sunday lunches, but have never experienced one. My wife absolutely refutes that they are a “cornerstone of Italian life”. Possibly this is more of a Southern thing, or it depends on the family involved.

  2. For years when invited to dine ” a mezzogiorno” I would arrive at noon only to find that none of the other guests were there yet. Finally I realized this had nothing to do with an exact time but was merely a way to say come to lunch and I adjusted my arrival to somewhere between 12:30 and 1:00 p.m.

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OPINION

Doggy bags and sharing plates: Why Italy’s last food-related taboos are dying out

Italy is famous for its strong culinary traditions and unwritten rules around eating, but as Italians embrace doggy bags and informal dining, Silvia Marchetti argues that the last food-related taboos have been broken.

Published: 25 April 2024 09:40 CEST
Updated: 28 April 2024 08:31 CEST
Doggy bags and sharing plates: Why Italy's last food-related taboos are dying out

Italians are deadly serious when it comes to eating or, as they say, “mettere le gambe sotto il tavolo”, meaning ‘putting your feet under the table’.

Three meals per day remain sacrosanct at home, but at restaurants the eating etiquette is changing, particularly in big cities where globalisation has an effect.

I recently discovered, much to my surprise, that Italians are embracing doggy bags. When I was a kid, many many years ago, to us Italians it always seemed like something only foreigners could do, especially Americans.

We would never have asked a waiter to give us a paper bag to bring away the food for the next day, it just would never have popped up in our minds: you eat what you are served and if you no longer wanted what you’d paid for, well too bad, you’ll leave it on the plate. It would’ve been embarrassing to walk away with a doggy bag.

So I was shocked when recently at a restaurant in Rome I saw Italians taking away bags of leftover lunch food, including cold pizza slices and meatballs. It almost knocked me off my chair.

READ ALSO: Are doggy bags still taboo in Italy’s restaurants?

When the waitress came to our table to bring the cheque, and saw that we hadn’t finished our fried  fish and spaghetti alle vongole, she asked if we wanted a doggy bag. My jaw dropped. It was a first for me.

Yet what really shocked me was that the restaurant was not in the city centre, but in the countryside where traditions tend to survive, or at the very least, take longer to die.

It struck me how it’s no longer foreigners asking for doggy bags, but even Italians have overcome the stigma of this former faux pas.

The sad truth is that it’s not just because of globalisation and the economic crisis following the pandemic. There’s been a fall in the cultural level of many Italians, so asking for a doggy bag is also a way to avoid having to cook for the evening or for the day after, rather than to save money.

Sadly, this trend is not an exception, nor a one-off, and in Italy it’s not driven by concerns over food waste (we’re really not that ‘green’) or the cost of living.

Italian restaurants are simply becoming more generically European and international, adapting to global habits and the requests of foreign clientele.

In Rome’s touristy spots, restaurants showcase photos of dishes outside the restaurant to lure customers, or display real plates of gluey carbonara. This is something I had never seen in my childhood.

I have noticed that other restaurant eating taboos and etiquette rules have fallen away, too.

A few (well-off) friends of mine bring their own bottles of wine along when they eat out so that they don’t have to pay for these at the restaurant. I find this very inappropriate, but it usually happens when the restaurant owner and customers are friends or know each other.

READ ALSO: Want to eat well in Italy? Here’s why you should ditch the cities

Trends in restaurant etiquette are changing. There are eateries that serve pizza at lunch, which used to be something you could only order for dinner unless you’re in Naples.

The standard three courses which we normally have are also being messed up: appetisers, first, second and side dishes are eaten in a disorderly way – something which would make my granny turn in her grave.

I have seen Italian families first order a T-bone steak and then pasta or a slice of pizza, while many couples share plates. The man orders one type of spaghetti dish, the woman orders another kind of spaghetti and half-way through the meal they switch dishes. This was something very unusual in the past. Before in restaurant there were boundaries in eating habits and in the eating culture, which are now blurring.

My parents taught me it is rude to poke your fork into someone else’s plate to curl up some spaghetti for yourself. My dad always looked sideways at anyone who did that: not only is it extremely improper, he thinks, but it is also very unhygienic.

There are no more rules left in Italian restaurants nowadays, and all taboos have been broken.

To adapt to foreign clients many restaurants tend to stay open the whole day, especially in very touristy areas, and the untouchable hours of lunch and dinner now overlap. Some taverns even serve breakfast.

READ ALSO: Why do Italians get so angry if you mess with classic recipes?

In the north, I’ve noticed that bread and extra-virgin olive oil are often missing from the table and you have to ask for them, which is something very atypical of Italian standards.

To find the traditional Italian eating code in restaurants where there are rules that will never die, one must go deep into unknown spots, and travel to remote villages no one has ever heard of. It’s always harder to find such authentic, untouched places.

I really hate to say this, but wherever there is mass tourism local traditions tend to die, particularly food-related ones.

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