Since public bathrooms are often not free, if I need to use one while I am out, I will sometimes stop at a café, buy a coffee for around €1.50, and use the bathroom there instead of paying almost the same amount just to get into a public restroom.
My favorite pasta I have eaten so far was a seafood pasta in Cinque Terre. The dish had mussels, shellfish, tomato, herbs and other kinds of seafood mixed into the pasta. I normally would not call myself a shellfish person at all, which made it even more surprising that this ended up being my favorite pasta dish in Italy. We also had white wine with the meal, which paired really well with the seafood.
Finally, in Torino I tried vitello tonnato, which is a traditional Piedmontese dish made with thin slices of veal covered in a tuna-based sauce. Part of the reason I ordered it was because I wanted something with a little more protein, which I have noticed can sometimes be harder to find in Italian meals compared with what I usually eat in the United States. I had never tried veal before, and I normally do not even like tuna that much, so ordering veal covered in tuna sauce felt like a pretty big gamble.
The foods that have become my favorites are usually the ones that surprised me. I already expected to like pesto, and I did, but the Genovese pesto I had on focaccia in Liguria was especially good. It tasted much fresher and more flavorful than the pesto I was used to, and it made me understand why the region is so famous for it.
The seafood pasta surprised me even more.
