Street Food in Arezzo: Local Snacks and What to Order

What street food in Arezzo actually looks like

There is no dedicated street-food lane, no row of kiosks with queues snaking round the block. Instead the city's snack culture lives in the shops and stalls of the centro storico, where you buy a slice of something warm and eat it standing up. The local trade press has long tracked street-food events arriving in Arezzo, which shows the appetite exists without a permanent quarter for it. That makes planning useful: know the snack, then find the shop.

Practically, you can treat a morning as a bakery stop, an afternoon as a market or rosticceria stop, and lunch as either a panino or a seated primo. Arezzo rewards walking, and the historic centre is compact enough that a tortello and a coffee can sit within a few minutes of each other. If you want a full sit-down meal instead, the wider choice is covered in our guide to the best restaurants in Arezzo.

Tortelli alla pistra casentinese: the square potato pasta

The tortello casentinese is the snack most tied to this corner of Tuscany. It is square and noticeably larger than a standard raviolo, filled with potato, and served either as a first course or as something to eat in hand. It belongs to the Casentino, the valley north of Arezzo, so treat it as a valley speciality that reaches the city rather than a dish invented in the centre.

Order it once plainly to taste the potato and the pasta, and look for a dressed version if a menu offers one. Because the filling is potato, the tortello eats like a carbohydrate on carbohydrate, so pair it with something sharp, a salad or a glass of white, rather than with another heavy course. Bakeries and pasta shops in the centre are the places to look, and they are best approached as counters where you point at what is ready.

Porchetta in a panino

Porchetta is a whole pig boned, rolled with rosemary and fennel flowers, and roasted for hours until the skin crackles. In Tuscany it is sold warm in a panino, and the instruction is to eat it soon after it comes out of the oven while the fat is still soft. Markets and rosticcerie are where you find it, so a market day is the right day to plan around a pork sandwich.

Ask for it simple: bread, pork, and a little salt if it needs it. Adding cheese or sauces buries the fennel and rosemary, which is the whole point of the sandwich. If you are eating a late breakfast or an early lunch, a panino of porchetta is the most efficient calorific stop in town.

Cecina: the thin chickpea flatbread

Cecina is a thin, golden flatbread made from chickpea flour, water, oil and salt, baked until it firms up at the edges. It is known elsewhere as farinata or torta di ceci, and Tuscans often eat it with soft cheeses such as stracchino, ricotta or gorgonzola. For a snack that costs little and weighs lightly, it is the best thing to buy while walking between squares.

Buy a piece plain first to taste the chickpea, then go back for a wedge with a spoonful of soft cheese if you want something richer. It is at its best hot from the tray, so watch for the moment a fresh one comes out rather than taking the last piece sitting in the window. A bakery or pizzeria counter is the natural place to ask.

Trippa and lampredotto: the offal panini

These are the Tuscan offal sandwiches, and they are not for everyone, but they are the most authentic fast lunch in the region. Trippa is tripe, a mix of stomach parts, while lampredotto is only the abomaso, the true stomach, darker and curled in shape. Both are boiled for a long time in broth and served hot in a panino with salsa verde, a green herb sauce.

Both are long-boiled and served hot, and the bread is usually softened with the cooking broth for a street sandwich. You will also find trippa and lampredotto on osteria menus, but the version eaten standing at a kiosk is how Tuscans take them at lunchtime.

Brigidini di Lamporecchio: anise wafers

Brigidini are thin, crisp, yellow-orange wafers made from flour, eggs, sugar and anise, and they come from Lamporecchio in the Pistoia area. They are sold at fairs and markets, and the anise gives them a clean, slightly medicinal sweetness that works well with coffee. Buy a small bag and eat them as you walk; they keep reasonably well in a coat pocket.

The pleasure is in the snap, so choose a bag that looks dry and unbroken rather than soft. They sit in the same family as the sweet fritters below, which makes a market morning pleasantly sugary if you let it.

Bomboloni and frittelle di riso: the sweet stop

Bomboloni are fried sweet doughnuts, sometimes filled with cream and always rolled in sugar, and they are eaten warm at any hour Tuscans feel like a merenda, the mid-afternoon snack. Frittelle di riso are the other classic, rice fritters that Tuscans associate with Siena and Piazza del Campo in the late season rather than with Arezzo. Both are bakery-counter food, so look for a shop with a fryer rather than a shelf of packaged cakes.

One is usually enough: they are heavy, and you will want to eat a proper lunch or dinner later. If you want a broader survey of the city's sweet side, our picks for the best gelato in Arezzo and the pastry shops in Arezzo make good next stops.

The first weekend of the month: Fiera Antiquaria

Arezzo's monthly antiques fair, the Fiera Antiquaria, was founded in 1968 and fills Piazza Grande and the surrounding streets on the first Sunday of each month and the preceding Saturday. It is an antiques market rather than a food market, but the crowds bring stalls and snacks with them, so it is the best weekend to combine browsing with grazing.

Plan to arrive in the morning, buy something from a stall, and eat it while the market is still filling up. Piazza Grande is the natural anchor, and the lanes around it hold the rest of the fair; a sit-down meal afterwards is covered in our round-up of trattorias in Arezzo if you want to stay in the area.

If you would rather have a proper plate than a panino, lunch in Arezzo is easy to arrange around the same streets, and booking ahead is sensible on fair weekends when the centre is busy.

September: when the street-food trucks arrive

Arezzo has hosted street-food gatherings in September, with food trucks and stalls setting up in the city's parks and squares. Coverage of past editions has described crowds and a mix of local and international street food, so if you are in town in early autumn it is worth checking what is on. The exact schedule changes year to year, so confirm the dates with the organiser before you build a day around it.

These events are fun but not where you learn the local food; the tortello and the porchetta are everyday snacks, not festival specialities. Treat a festival as a bonus rather than the reason to come.

Where to start eating in Arezzo

Start with a tortello casentinese and a piece of cecina, then take a porchetta panino when you find one warm. Add brigidini or a bombolone for the walk, and if you are in town on the first weekend of the month, let the Fiera Antiquaria set your route through the centre.

For the evening, our guide to aperitivo in Arezzo covers the drinks and snacks that bridge the gap between afternoon and dinner.