What do Italians actually eat for breakfast?

Visitors to Italy often go looking for a big breakfast and find a counter, an espresso machine and a glass case of pastries. That is not a failure of hospitality. It is the point: the Italian morning is short and sweet, and the serious eating comes later in the day.

The sweet breakfast at home

Wikipedia's entry on Italian meal structure describes the most popular breakfast, colazione, as sweet, eaten either at home or at a café. At home, it says, it usually means coffee, milk or caffè latte with baked things such as biscuits, or slices of bread with butter and jam, honey or a chocolate-hazelnut cream; milk is sometimes swapped for fruit juice. On Sundays and holidays there may be cakes, tarts or regional specialities.

Italian Wikipedia's colazione entry gives a similar picture, listing biscuits, fette biscottate (crisp, toasted rusks), cornetti, bread with chocolate or jam, yogurt, cereals, cakes and crostate, alongside coffee, milk, cappuccino or tea.

In practice, a home breakfast might be:

• Caffè latte in a big cup, with biscuits for dunking.
• Fette biscottate spread with butter and jam.
• A slice of homemade cake, often a plain ciambella or a crostata from the day before.
• Yogurt and fruit, increasingly common.

Breakfast at the bar

The Italian bar is a café, and many people have breakfast there on the way to work. The English Wikipedia entry describes espresso as dominant at the café, with cappuccino or latte macchiato, accompanied by a cornetto, a bombolone (a filled doughnut) or another pastry, with plenty of regional variety.

A few things worth knowing:

• The cornetto, meaning little horn, is the crescent-shaped pastry at the heart of it. Wikipedia's cornetto entry says the name is now used interchangeably with croissant, that it is often filled with custard, apricot jam or chocolate cream, and that in the north it is usually called a brioche.
• It is quick. A cornetto with an espresso or cappuccino at the counter is, the same entry says, considered the most common breakfast in Italy. A few minutes, a chat with the barista, and off.
• Every bar has its own habits, so watch what the regulars do: where to order, where to pay, whether to sit.

Savoury breakfasts and coffee only

Both Wikipedia entries note that savoury breakfasts are much less frequent, though not unknown: the English entry mentions focaccia, or toasted bread with olive oil, tomato or salami. It also says that many Italians have only coffee and nothing to eat.

Why it looks this way

The English entry notes that across the Mediterranean, breakfast is often skipped or lighter than in other parts of Europe, and that Italians commonly have small mid-morning and afternoon snacks, merenda. With a snack mid-morning and a proper lunch ahead, a sweet coffee-and-something breakfast makes sense.

Bringing it home

For an Italian-style breakfast without a bar downstairs:

• Make a simple cake at the weekend and eat slices through the week: an olive oil cake, a lemon ciambella or a jam crostata.
• Keep good biscuits for dunking, from plain rusks to cantucci.
• Toast good bread and spread it with butter and apricot jam.
• Make coffee properly, with a moka pot or whatever you have, and sit down for five minutes.