What to bring home from Italy?

[ChinHairDontCare]

We're going on holidays to Italy. Will have a hire car so can get to supermarkets/towns. Have been ruthless packing so we have some space to bring things home. What should I look out for? Whether good clothes shops we don't have in the UK, perfume/beauty brands, supermarket steals, snacks, etc.

I went to a small local farm when we stayed in Tuscany and bought a 3l can of olive oil. It was almost luminous in colour and tasted sublime.

The sales have just started and you can find 70% off in some of the franchises like Original Marines (lovely casual kids clothes), Oviesse, Tezenis (good quality underwear and cotton tshirts for men), Stradivarius (cool teen girls, I think it’s Spanish).
Just head for your nearest big shopping centre.

A rotary parmesan grater (Acea brand). I loved mine but it broke recently and I can't get one here for love nor money. I highly recommend one.

Limoncello

This jug-less espresso pot for the coffee snob in your life.

Olive oil
Truffles or truffle oil
Biscuits
Sun dried tomatoes
Pasta
I got some nice artwork from a street vendor in Rome
Murano glass?

We have one of those and it’s so hard to use! 🤣 always feels like it’s going to topple over. And we’re big moka fans in our house. But we’ve stuck with the standard model.

What we tend to bring back are dried mushrooms, biscuits (if you have a Coop near you, their apricot & yoghurt ones are lovely), coffee, chocolate (Novi from the supermarket) and, if going via car, usually a hunk or two of Parmesan, vacuum packed and well packed away!

Crema Novi - it’s like Nutella but far superior. The ingredients are hazelnuts, sugar, cocoa, skim milk and cocoa butter!! It’s incredible with breadsticks.

Sorry if said before, tuna in olive oil is just amazing. Once you get the Italian one you can't go back to the tuna you buy in the UK. Rio Mare is very good (sold by Ocado too but more expensive in UK) but any brand is good there. As a gift you can also get the pricey one in a jar. Delicious!

Thanks everyone for all the great suggestions. I felt like I could target the supermarket much better with all this insider info! We fell in love with novi hazelnut choc and spread. We also loved the mulino blanco biscuits. I couldn't find the dove talco but did find breeze talcada which I loved and then led us into the world of Italian deodorants with the spritz bottles and the splash on ones etc. We bought pocket coffee drink things and to be honest still don't know how or when to use them. And of course enjoyed lots of the suggested foods while we were away. For other people travelling we enjoyed eating all the amazing sausage products (dried or fresh) and took on the habit of antipasto with the jars of mixed antipasto, dried sausage and pecorino with a drink before dinner. We also loved all the cherry stuff, from the fresh cherries themselves, to cherry yoghurts and the cherry syrup that we added to sparkling water. Finally, I hope those of you in Italy have been okay with the weather extremes of late.

Oh and the soap! I brought back a load of soap!

No pocket coffee?? It's the best.

The only pocket coffee I found was little packets of coffee drinks. I couldn't find the coffee filled chocolates at all.

They don’t make them in the summer

You're in the capital city 🤨