Michelin Guide Italy 2026: 394 Starred Restaurants, 22 New to Stars, 21 Stars Lost

The 2026 guide in numbers

Michelin's release for the 71st Italian edition gives the full set. There are 394 starred restaurants: 15 with three stars, 38 with two and 341 with one. Alongside them sit 255 Bib Gourmand restaurants, chosen for good cooking at moderate prices, and 1,322 restaurants recommended without a distinction. The whole selection comes to 1,971 restaurants. A further 72 restaurants hold a Green Star for sustainable practice, a badge that sits on top of the other categories and is not added to the total.

The ceremony took place at the Teatro Regio in Parma, the city that also hosted the presentations of the 2017 to 2019 guides. Michelin's Italian pages and the Italian press date it 19 November 2025; the company's English release carries the date 20 November, the day it was published. The Bib Gourmand list was revealed separately a week earlier, on 12 November 2025.

One change sits at the top. La Rei Natura by Michelangelo Mammoliti, in Serralunga d'Alba in Piedmont's Langhe, rose from two stars to three. That took Italy's three-star count from 14 to 15. Two restaurants were promoted to two stars: Famiglia Rana in Oppeano, near Verona, and I Tenerumi on the Aeolian island of Vulcano. Michelin's own article says I Tenerumi earned "its second Star"; Famiglia Rana's previous star is implied by Veneto's counts, which only balance if it was already a one-star.

Twenty-two restaurants entered the starred list for the first time, all at one star. Michelin notes that eight of their chefs are 35 or younger and two are 30 or younger, and that six of the 22 were added during the year, before the ceremony. The 25 stars awarded therefore came from 22 restaurants new to stars plus three promotions, spread across 14 regions.

Read across three editions, the totals barely move. Starred restaurants went from 395 in the 2024 guide to 393 and then 394. The one-star tier has held at 341 or 342 for three years. What changed is the flow: 33 new stars in the 2024 guide, 36 in the 2025 guide and 25 in the 2026 guide. The 2026 intake of first-time one-stars, 22, was the smallest of the three, down from 33 a year earlier.

The recommended list without distinctions shrank by 18 restaurants to 1,322, and the Bib Gourmand list grew by five to 255. Green Stars are harder to read. The 2025 guide gave 69, with 11 described as new, though Michelin's own page names only ten of them. The 2026 guide adds five and reaches 72. Since 69 plus five is 74, at least two Green Stars were withdrawn in the same selection. Michelin does not name them; the figure is our arithmetic.

A flat total that hides 21 departures

Michelin publishes the new stars. It does not publish the losses. Those come from the Italian food press, which reconstructs them by comparing the old and new lists. Scatti di Gusto and Dissapore, both writing on the night and updating in the following week, count the same 21 lost stars.

One is a demotion within the starred list. Miramonti l'Altro in Concesio, near Brescia, dropped from two stars to one; it stays among the 394. The other 20 restaurants left the starred list. Dissapore's text counts 15 of them as "not confirmed" because they had closed, moved or reopened under a new concept, and five as demoted, though its own list files two of those five as closed and reopened. Scatti di Gusto groups them slightly differently, filing Turin's Magorabin among the closures where Dissapore lists it as a relaunch. Both count 21 lost stars.

Five of the 20 were still trading when they lost their star. Two of them, Zum Löwen in Tesimo, South Tyrol, and Josè Restaurant at Tenuta Villa Guerra in Torre del Greco, near Naples, had closed and reopened with a new format, according to both outlets. Only three lost their star with no change of format: Casa Vissani in Baschi, Umbria; Porta di Basso in Peschici on the Gargano; and Arnaldo-Clinica Gastronomica in Rubiera, near Reggio Emilia, which Scatti di Gusto says had held a star continuously since 1959. Michelin gives no reason for any individual decision.

The closures are the larger group. Dissapore lists nine: Terramira in Capolona, Abbruzzino in Catanzaro, Vite in Lancenigo, Felix Lo Basso in Milan, Accursio in Modica, L'Acciuga in Perugia, L'Arcade in Porto San Giorgio, Sud in Quarto and Essenza in Terracina. Four more moved premises (The Cook in Genoa, Luigi Lepore in Lamezia Terme, Bros' in Lecce and Osteria Arbustico in Paestum), and two relaunched (Re Maurì in Salerno and Magorabin in Turin). A star belongs to an address and a kitchen at a point in time. When a restaurant moves, it has to be inspected again.

The accounts almost close. Take 393 restaurants, remove the 20 that left and add the 22 new to stars, and the result is 395, one more than Michelin's 394. Either one departure is missing from the press lists, or the starting base moved during the year, which Michelin now allows: six of this year's 22 new one-stars were added between ceremonies. We report the gap rather than force it shut.

At regional level the press lists and Michelin's counts do reconcile. Lombardy's one-star tier went from 51 to 55: four new one-stars, plus Miramonti coming down from two, minus Felix Lo Basso. Campania went from 42 to 40: four departures (Sud, Josè, Osteria Arbustico and Re Maurì) against two arrivals, Alain Ducasse's restaurant in Naples and Umberto a Mare in Forio on Ischia. Tuscany went from 38 to 39, with Terramira out and two new restaurants in Florence and Forte dei Marmi.

Nine of the 20 departures were in the South and the islands, about 45%, in a part of the country that holds about a quarter of starred restaurants. Only one of the nine, Porta di Basso, lost its star with no change of format. Twenty restaurants are too few to call that a trend. It is a reason to check again when the 2027 list appears.

Where the stars are: the regional map

Michelin's release ranks only the top five regions. Lombardy leads with 64 starred restaurants (three with three stars, six with two, 55 with one), ahead of Campania with 48, Tuscany with 45, and Piedmont and Veneto with 34 each. For the other 15 regions we counted every restaurant on Michelin's full 2026 list, using the region in each restaurant's guide address. Two separate passes agreed, our figures match Michelin's for the five regions it publishes, and the columns add up to 15, 38 and 341.

The provincial ranking tells a different story from the regional one. The province of Naples has 27 starred restaurants, more than any other, followed by Rome with 26, Bolzano with 21, Milan with 20 and Salerno with 16. Naples and Salerno together hold 43 of Campania's 48. Rome's province gained three in a year, from 23 to 26, with two new restaurants in the city and one in Tivoli. For how the capital's visitor numbers compare, see our Rome tourism statistics.

Lombardy's lead is wide and growing. It gained three restaurants in the 2026 guide, from 61 to 64, while Campania fell from 50 to 48. The five leading regions held 225 of the 394 starred restaurants, 57.1%, almost exactly their 57.0% share in the 2025 guide. Concentration at the top is stable from year to year; the names inside it move.

Three-star cooking is more concentrated still. Ten of the 15 three-star restaurants are in the North: three in Piedmont (Piazza Duomo in Alba, Villa Crespi in Orta San Giulio and La Rei Natura), three in Lombardy (Da Vittorio in Brusaporto, Enrico Bartolini al Mudec in Milan and Dal Pescatore near Canneto sull'Oglio), two in Veneto (Le Calandre in Rubano and Casa Perbellini 12 Apostoli in Verona), Atelier Moessmer Norbert Niederkofler in Brunico and Osteria Francescana in Modena. Three are in the Centre: Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence, La Pergola in Rome and Uliassi in Senigallia. Two are in the South: Reale in Castel di Sangro, Abruzzo, and Quattro Passi in Nerano on the Sorrento peninsula.

Sicily has no three-star restaurant but four with two stars: La Madia in Licata, Duomo in Ragusa, St. George by Heinz Beck in Taormina and the newly promoted I Tenerumi. Taormina alone has five starred restaurants. Sardinia has five starred restaurants, all with one star, four of them in the north-east, in Gallura, and the fifth in Pula. Molise has one, Locanda Mammì in Agnone.

North and South: stars against population

Grouping the regions into ISTAT's three macro-areas makes the imbalance measurable. The North has 209 starred restaurants, 53.0% of the national total, and 46.8% of Italy's residents. The Centre has 88, or 22.3%, with 19.8% of residents. The Mezzogiorno, ISTAT's term for the South and the islands, has 97, or 24.6%, with 33.4% of residents.

Per head, the North and the Centre are almost level, at 7.6 and 7.5 starred restaurants per million residents. The Mezzogiorno has 4.9. The national figure is 6.7. These ratios are our arithmetic, using ISTAT's provisional population at 1 January 2026, and they describe restaurant supply only.

The southern figure also rests on one region. Campania alone accounts for 48 of the Mezzogiorno's 97 starred restaurants, about half. The other seven southern and island regions, together, have 49. Puglia has eight starred restaurants, all with one star. Calabria and Sardinia have five each, Basilicata two and Molise one.

Counting stars rather than restaurants does not change the picture much. Weighting each restaurant by its stars gives 462 stars nationally: 247 in the North (53.5%), 103 in the Centre and 112 in the Mezzogiorno. The North's share rises slightly because it holds most of the three-star kitchens.

The guide's own material does not explain the distribution. Michelin's inspectors judge the food on the plate, using five criteria the company publishes: quality of ingredients, harmony of flavours, mastery of technique, the chef's personality expressed through the cooking, and consistency over time and across the menu. Michelin says stars are awarded to the restaurant, not the chef. Nothing in the guide's published material links the distribution to income, tourism flows or investment, and any such explanation would be an inference. Our Naples tourism statistics and Tuscany tourism statistics set out the visitor numbers in two of the leading regions.

Counting the right thing

Three counting problems run through coverage of the guide, and two start with Michelin itself.

The first is the unit. Michelin's 2026 release says the selection "boasts 394 starred restaurants" and, in another passage, gives "a total of 394 Stars awarded across the peninsula". It introduces its regional table as "the rankings of MICHELIN Stars per region" and then gives Lombardy's figure as 64 restaurants. Its English article on the 2025 guide referred to "the 393 Stars in this latest selection", which was the number of starred restaurants. The 394 starred restaurants hold 462 stars between them.

The second is the word "new". Michelin's release says the guide "honors 25 newcomers among its starred establishments". Three of those 25 already had stars and moved up a level. Its other phrasing, "25 new Stars in total in 14 regions", is accurate. The number of restaurants new to the starred list is 22, which is what Qualitytravel's headline of 20 November 2025, "22 new entry", reports correctly. Across the whole guide, Michelin's Italian page counts "over 125" new entries. Its English release gives 105 new recommended restaurants and 16 new Bib Gourmand, while Dissapore and Scatti di Gusto both count 24 new Bib Gourmand, so that last figure is contested.

The third is the loss count. Qualitytravel's report names Casa Vissani, Arnaldo-Clinica Gastronomica, Porta di Basso, Zum Löwen and Josè Restaurant as losing their star, plus Miramonti's drop from two stars to one, in a passage about "some historic names". The names are correct, and the outlet does not present them as the full set. Re-used as a complete list, they would cover six of the 21 lost stars and leave out the 15 closures, moves and relaunches.

The tourism claim: half a billion, unverified

The figure most often quoted for the guide's economic effect in Italy is "half a billion euros". It comes from a study by the research firm JFC, branded "Taste Tourism", presented at Michelin Italia's 70th-anniversary event in September 2024 and reported by Il Sole 24 Ore and Scatti di Gusto. The study puts the spending induced around starred restaurants, outside the restaurants themselves, at EUR 438.85 million in 2023 and EUR 498 million forecast for 2024. It counts 2.4 million customers at starred restaurants in 2023, over 40% of them from abroad, and says 74.6% of foreign and 39.5% of Italian customers stayed at least one night nearby.

The pages we opened do not publish the method, the sample sizes or who commissioned the work. Scatti di Gusto, reporting the figures, remarked that the study "pecca un po' di auto-promozione", a little self-promotional. The 2024 number is a forecast. The figures also do not fully reconcile. The study gives average customers per restaurant of 3,262 for one star, 3,638 for two and 6,003 for three, and works from 342, 40 and 13 restaurants, the counts in the 2024 guide. Multiplied out, that is 1,339,163 customers, about 1.34 million, against the 2.4 million it reports. The difference may lie in definitions we cannot see. Until the method is published, the study remains a self-reported estimate, and its half-billion figure cannot be read as a measured effect.

The academic evidence we found does not fill the gap. A 2022 study in the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management by Bang, Choi and Kim compared 109 starred and 109 non-starred restaurants using more than 160,000 OpenTable reviews, with no Italian focus; it found stars raised diners' perceived social, hedonic and service value. It did not measure tourism. A 2019 book chapter by Ercolano, Alfano and Parenti links starred restaurants and tourist presences in Italy to the months when MasterChef is on air; we read only its abstract, which gives no effect size. Neither establishes what a star does to arrivals, nights or spending in a destination.

The official statistics cannot settle it either. Bank of Italy's international tourism survey does not publish a food-motivated trip category by country, and ISTAT counts nights by municipality without asking why visitors came. A town that gains a three-star restaurant would show the effect only if it were large enough to stand out from every other cause of change, and no study we found has tried. For what different visitor groups spend per night in Italy, see our analysis of spend per night.

What the 2027 guide will test

The next selection is revealed on 12 November 2026 at the Teatro Municipale in Piacenza, as Michelin's Italian site, Scatti di Gusto and Quotidiano.net report. After Modena and Parma, it will be the third ceremony in a row held in Emilia-Romagna. Michelin has already announced its 2027 Bib Gourmand selection on its Italian site, and Scatti di Gusto counted 37 new Bib Gourmand entries on 6 November 2026, a figure the full list will confirm or correct. Three questions from the 2026 figures can be checked against it. First, whether the starred total stays near 394, as it has for three editions. Second, whether departures again come mostly from closures and moves, or whether open restaurants account for more of them. Third, whether the Mezzogiorno's share, 24.6%, rises or falls, and whether any of its regions beyond Campania adds a second or third star.

A fourth check is on Michelin's own reporting. If the 2027 release again labels restaurant counts as stars and counts promotions as new starred restaurants, the corrections in this article will apply to it as well. The 2026 counts above are the baseline for that comparison.

Corrections and claims checked

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travellers planning a meal from the guide should treat the 2026 list as the latest full star list and check again after 12 November 2026, when the 2027 selection is revealed in Piacenza. One in twenty of the 2025 guide's starred restaurants left the list in the 2026 guide, most because they closed or moved, so an old article or a framed certificate is no guarantee. Naples and its coast offer the densest cluster in the South, with 27 starred restaurants in the province, and the North holds ten of the 15 three-star kitchens. The Bib Gourmand list, 255 entries in the 2026 guide, is the guide's own pointer to good cooking at moderate prices; Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna lead it with 34 each, and Michelin has already announced the 2027 Bib Gourmand additions. Our Naples travel guide covers the province with the most starred restaurants.

Tourism businesses and investors should treat the guide as a snapshot of 394 restaurants, revised every November and now during the year as well. Churn ran at about 5% of the starred list in the 2026 guide, and most of it came from closures and moves, so a star attached to a hotel or a destination is only as stable as the business that holds it. The South holds a quarter of Italy's starred restaurants with a third of its population, and half of that quarter is in Campania; for the rest of the Mezzogiorno, starred supply is thin. Anyone pricing a "Michelin effect" into a project should know that the only Italian estimate is an unpublished survey and that no study measures the effect on arrivals. A published method, or a before-and-after study of towns that gained or lost a three-star kitchen, would change that assessment.

Journalists and analysts can cite Michelin's own figures for the 2026 guide: 394 starred restaurants (15 three-star, 38 two-star, 341 one-star), 255 Bib Gourmand, 1,322 recommended, 1,971 in total, 72 Green Stars, Lombardy 64, Campania 48, Tuscany 45, Piedmont and Veneto 34, and Naples province 27. Call them restaurants, or say 462 stars. Say 22 restaurants new to stars and 25 new stars, and name the edition: the 2026 guide was revealed on 19 November 2025. The 21 losses are a press count; Michelin publishes no list. Do not cite "half a billion" as a measured tourism effect. This article adds a further case to a finding that runs through the series. Italy's food assets are counted precisely by a private guide, and the visitors they attract are hardly measured at all.