PWMTrav

Try doing it yourself first. Most will speak enough English to take a reservation, especially in the more touristy cities.

Buona sera. Voglio prenotare per pranzo/cena, pero posso parlare inglese?

If you strike out anywhere, your hotel can help, but odds are you'll be fine.

GadgetFreak

I find most place speak English as well but I wouldn't hesitate to ask a hotel concierge or front desk to call. I fact even in London, where they speak English (at least after a fashion ) I have emailed my hotel pre trip and asked them to make reservations for me, particularly at places that can be tough like St. John.

Perche

There is no reason at all to be scared. Decent restaurants are always called by people speaking english, german, french, etc. seeking reservations.

Depending on the hour you call you will hear someone say buon giorno, or buona sera. Just say, do you speak english? You will get a yes almost 100% of the time. If not they will say hold on, and someone who speaks english will be on the phone in less than 30 seconds. It will not be a problem.

You should know that while reservations are essential, they can usually be made the same day by stopping at the restaurant at lunch time and asking them to reserve a table. For a good restaurant, do it a week or two ahead. For a trip to Italy in May it would not cross my mind to make reservations in early March. Most places won't even accept reservations that early.

Maybe for a place like Le Calandre in Padua, recently selected as the best restaurant in the entire world, replacing Noma in Copenhagen that ruled for years, until it was beat out by Cella de San Roca in Spain. In those places you should think about booking months ahead. Most restaurants will not accept reservations for May in March. It's too far ahead. A week or two, or even a day or two, is fine for most places.

If you feel shy about asking your hotel to make the reservations, that's a problem, because they should without even thinking about it. Just don't ask the hotel for a recommendation about where to eat unless you want to eat bad food. They will just send you to their friends' places, places they figure tourists will like. You might like it, but eating at a restaurant with authentic italian food will be far better.

The only way to eat a worse meal than from a recommendation from the hotel is to use TripAdvisor. One of the places you mentioned from TripAdvisor early in your research was Da Moro's, which they rated as one of the best "restaurants" in all of Venice. The one that serves food in cardboard take out boxes with a plastic knife and fork. To indicate just how bad TripAdvisor is, "Da Moro's" can't even spell their own name right. An apostrophe "s" doesn't exist in the Italian language. If they can't figure out an Italian name for themselves, I'm sure the sauce comes out of some industrial drum in the back.

Don't worry. Get a Skype account and call the restaurant. It will help break the ice for you for doing things like that. If not, email the hotel, and be sure to get a confirmation. Tourism is one of Italy's most important economic sectors. Except for the occasional jerk, they will take great care of you.

PWMTrav

Tangent time.

Where in Italy have you experienced the earliest transition to buona sera? 2pm in Florence has to be a contender.

Perche

That would definitely be early! In Venice and in Rome, it's more like 5 PM, when the mood shifts towards the evening.

jwc13

Thanks everyone! I'm not planning to make the reservations now, but was just planning ahead to understand which places required phone reservations and which could be done online.

jb12

do you dial 039 when calling inside of Italy for reservations?

Perche

That depends on your phone. For example, if you are using a USA phone when you arrive in Italy, you would have to dial the international code for Italy which is +39. If you arrive to Italy and buy an Italian SIM card and put it in your phone, it is no longer an international call and you just dial the area code and number.

If you are arriving from a country other than the USA some countries have an exit code that you have to dial to get out of the country before you dial +39 to get to Italy.

Calling Italy from within Italy doesn't require you to use the +39 international country code unless you are using a non-Italian SIM card.

KLouis

Just last week I hade a couple of good friends visiting from the US. They wanted to check their phones and we found out that when calling me using the full monty (011 plus country code, or country code alone) the call would not complete, but if instead they dialed as if calling from a Greek phone (i.e. just the 10 digit number and no country code), they would get immediately connected. Unfortunately I did not ask them who their US provider was, but they were both using iPhones. Perhaps that also works in Italy, i.e. start dialing 06.... for Rome etc, even with the US SIM: phones have gotten very smart lately!

JMN57

This may be little late for the OP but if you call Al Covo, Diane, part of the husband/wife team that owns it hails from Texas so no problems with English as she runs the front of the house. Very kind and generous as well.

And I second Perche's comment and raise it - one of the best restaurants the Veneto. Truly great food and a wonderfully relaxing place to eat.

PWMTrav

That's normal. When you're roaming, you dial outbound according to the network you're roaming on, not the network carrier back home that bills you. So if you have a US cell phone with a US carrier, but you're in Italy using an international roaming plan sold to you by the US carrier, you still dial like you're on the Italian network to connect to an Italian number (meaning you don't dial +39).

Inbound calls to you are unchanged - if you have a US number, someone calling you would still need to dial +1.

A lot of phones will handle this for you out of the contacts list, particularly if you enter your contacts explicitly with a country code, so you may not notice why just tapping on a contact works. You figure it out when you need to dial a different number!

PWMTrav

That's not generally accurate as far as I know. Calling Italy from within Italy doesn't require +39 regardless of the SIM card, provided that you're roaming onto a local network (which is true 99% of the time for Americans).

Perche

You're probably right, if roaming, but I try not to roam. I try to Skype, and it asks for the country and shows this prefix.

PWMTrav

Not roaming in the sense that you're on a usage-billed 3rd party network, just roaming in the sense that you're on some other network. Example being you have Verizon in the US, you buy some international voice+data coverage, go to Italy. You're roaming on whatever carrier Verizon has the agreement with for the plan it sold you. In that instance, you don't need to dial +39.

Keep in mind that Skype is some form of VOIP and transports your call using data service from your handset to something acting as a (US domestic) switch. It might land it on a traditional network, but since the outbound dial and the transport are done however Skype wants to do it, it can very well require the country code. Skype, Google Voice and such are all the same way - they're initiating the call as a US domestic and switching it to wherever the destination is, so for them, no matter where in the world you are, you never dial +1 for a US number. It's the opposite with most physical cellular networks.

VivoPerLei

Laughing to myself thinking about our own desperate attempt to find this restaurant a few years ago as our reservation time neared. A test run would definitely have saved a lot of aggravation