What is a typical breakfast in Italy?

Alice Twain

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Updated 4y

What is a typical breakfast in Italy?

Italy is not much of breakfast country. We usually have very light, sweet breakfasts. Most people will drink a coffee: it may be an espresso, a coffee made with a moka pot, or sometimes other types of coffee; it may be black, with sugar, or with a dash of milk. Some people would rather drink milk: adults usually with a dose of coffee (caffellatte). Children may have it white (with just a little sugar), with cocoa (you may call it hot chocolate in English, to us hot chocolate is more like a light pudding), or with toasted barley. Some people prefer to have tea, usually with a slice of lemon and no milk.

A bowl of warm milk with some coffee and stale bread in it is a pretty popular breakfast.

Many people will just have the “liquid part” of breakfast; most will also eat something, most commonly carbs. These could range from stale bread (usually dipped in the caffellatte) to fresh bread (not toasted) spread with jam and, sometimes, a hint of butter, light cookies (not superfat or supersweet like the American cookies), or rusk.

Coffee, a freshly baked bread roll, a couple teaspoons of jam: Italian breakfast.

Some people prefer to have breakfast at the local bar, which in Italy usually means a coffee shop. This is a way to hurry up when you need to go to work, or a Sunday luxury. Breakfast at the bar usually include espresso (plain or macchiato), cappuccino, or marocchino (a sort of middle ground between espresso and cappuccino) with a pastry, usually a croissant filled with jam, custard, or chocolate.

Bar breakfast: cappuccino and criossants.

Now, a couple of things you may want to notice, are that:

1. On most days breakfast is the only sweet stuff we eat through the day, with the exception of fruit, so we are not overdosing on sugar throughout the day;
2. Most Italians will have dinner fairly late, around 8 pm, a couple of hours before going to bed. This means that most of us do not get up as hungry in the morning. Once we have a light snack, we can wait for lunch, which is the first meal of the day.