Weirdly I found that most of the restaurants I ate at in Italy were level with or worse than the Italian restaurants in Melbourne, Australia. I think part of it was just that it's hard to find the good ones vs the average/bad ones in Italy while Italian restaurants in Australia tend to all be targeting higher end food.

The Autogrill ones were not terrible but not particularly good. Mostly just stale sandwiches which decent quality ingredients.

Italy has become a den of tourist traps. I ate terribly there despite my Italian is still good enough that the locals thought I was a native Roman (I lived there as a teen)

I mean depends where you are. If you know how to use Maps and spot tourist traps you'll be fine.

Spent a couple weeks in Italy last month. Autogrills are ok, but there are actually some quite good restaurants in and outside tourist areas.

We found an amazing Masseria in the Gargano that was great. Outside Venice there was a beer/pizza pub that was exceptional as well. Random is often better than relying on tourist guides.

That said, yelp and google are often unreliable for restaurants. I found the app TheFork was quite useful.

Speaking of Venice, one amazing restaurant we found by chance was Trattoria Alla Madonna. I have a feeling there's a bit of a Curb Your Enthusiasm-type setup there where if you speak any Italian and try to pass as even slightly more local than the average tourist, you get seated at a "locals only" part of the restaurant. I have nothing to base that on other than the fact that the waiter-cum-host sized us up a few times before deciding where to sit us, and when he did, the table next to us was a family of locals that has been eating there after Sunday mass every week for the last few decades. I remember the young gentleman on that table kept asking them to remake the homemade mayo because it wasn't quite right. On the third try, he approved it, and then the waiter confessed the chef also agreed that only that iteration was "just right". Equal parts weird and hilarious.

The food was absolutely amazing and it felt great to be away from the tourists for a bit.

If you are skilled with Google Maps you can find lots and lots of good restaurants in Italy.

Yelp in Italy doesn't really exist, no one in Italy uses that. TheFork is okay for the deals that they have, like coupon etc. but to be fair I would not recommend that for tourists since you'll be missing out lots of nice restaurants since on TheFork there are just a few of them.

Yes, TheFork is limited. We usually go with local recommendations. We also tend to return to the same places so know what we prefer / are looking for.

Places we've eaten at in Puglia (from Tricase to Lecce to Vieste) are a mix of local recommendations, places we've researched, or random luck. A place we stayed outside Treviso/near Venice, the little hotel recommended this pizza place where entering there must have been a hen party or some such (many women poured into slip dresses of a wide age range) and we were skeptical. Turned out to be really quite good - different types of crust, local and other draft beers, etc.

I check the Google reviews, try and screen out any Americans - so fussy and no idea, normally - then just stop by, look and see what the vibe is like. 95% of the time this works perfectly for us and we eat well. I also make a point of asking locals in shops and galleries that we like what places they'd recommend.

I do agree on the big city thing though. I can get Italian food in London that’s as good as or better than most of what we had. But that’s a complement to cities like London and Melbourne rather than a sledge on Italy. We had a series of “good” meals, then a couple of “greats” across Bologna and Tuscany. Absolutely could not complain - apart from the place in Bologna that charged us €10 for pasta e burro for our toddler; screw them.

“so fussy and no idea” is a great phrase and really captures a certain kind of review!

Is there a variant of Godwin's law where an internet discussion always lead to people criticising the USA, regardless of subject?

No, it's not about criticising, but turning every post into a discussion about the US. There's a lot of Americans in this place, and they don't know much about the rest of the world, so they filter everything through their experience.

"La culture, c'est comme la confiture. Moins on on a, plus on l'étale" — Knowledge is like jam, the least you have, the more you spread it.

{Latin Americans, Europeans, Africans, etc...} don't know much about the rest of the world, either. But it seems that only people from the United States are criticized on this website for not knowing a whole lot about how things go in different continents.

The cliché at hand is more about the quality of Italian food in Italy than about any cuisine in the USA. Food-wise, the US is actually doing pretty well among Western countries. I'm not going to name the countries at the bottom of the list to be respectful, but they mostly don't dispute it.

If you want, coin the name. The fact is that the probability of any topic being mentioned in a discussion approaches one as the length of the discussion approaches infinity. It should have been called Godwin's Tautology. :)

Thats unsurprising. "Italian" food in America isn't and the Autogrill is excellent.