Ordinarily, when you read about a restaurant critic going to Italy, it’s a farewell column. Why suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Boston bistros when you can buy a villa in Umbria and eat Italian food all the time? Unfortunately, the price of Italian real estate is now higher than the Tuscan sun at noon. So I’m back, along with some comparisons between Italian restaurants in Boston and Italian restaurants in Italy. My evidence is two weeks of eating in informal trattorias in Umbria and Tuscany (with two in Rome), as well as three banquets served in an Umbrian villa by a fine local cook, Rolanda Cardinali, and two meals I made myself from local produce. I also went to a regional wine fair in a small town in southern Tuscany.

One of the biggest surprises is that Italian produce is not actually that different from what we buy in Boston. The meats and vegetables in Italian supermarkets and trattorias in July are not much better than our own, not even the tomatoes. (Bodacious cantaloupes were a July exception.) And the produce in Boston farmers’ markets is actually rather better, in many categories, than that in a small-town farmers’ market in Umbria. (Those categories do not include cheese, olive oil, or honey, however.) Even the arugula in Italy is stringier, although the flavor is nice and sharp.

Bread in Tuscany and Umbria is traditionally made without salt, and served without butter or olive oil. Restaurant bread in those provinces was therefore almost completely inedible, except to mop up salty dishes, or when we could get a little olive oil by ordering a salad. A typical Umbrian and Tuscan antipasto is various spreads on the unsalted bread, and they weren’t my favorites, either. What is salted in these provinces is biscuits, but except for a hot cheese biscuit at La Congrega, in Florence, these biscuits would not pass muster in the Southern US.

Italian restaurants generally feature regional specialties, but a number of dishes are now pan-Italian, and Americans have them, too. One is pizza, but even the pizza near the bus stations of Italian tourist towns is thin-crusted, lightly topped, and superior to almost all Boston pizza. Tiramisu is also quite common in Italy, and not any better or worse than what we get. Caprese salad is now a national dish in Italy, but the quality of fresh mozzarella was often below what you get in Boston, although all the tomatoes were serviceable and the basil was excellent — and conditions are probably similar for most of the year.

But moderately priced Italian restaurants are better than ours in a number of surprising ways: they have cleaner and more expensively finished bathrooms. Servers do not press you to order more food than you want. And all Italian restaurants have innocuous house wines that are clean, inexpensive, and have few aftereffects. I had quite a few discussions with fellow travelers about these wines. An organic winemaker from Alto Adige suggested that sulfites are used less in Italian domestic wines. My own theory is that eating lots of pasta keeps one well hydrated. House wines are also somewhat lower in alcohol than export bottles. Although cheap Chianti is the closest thing to this innocuous wine on the shelves of Boston wine stores, it doesn’t appear on many lists in Boston restaurants.

Where Boston’s Italian restaurants could really benefit from a refresher course is in the use of vegetables. La Groceria, in Cambridge, used to set a large table of antipasti, from which waiters would assemble you a selection. I ate my first and last meals in Italy at La Famiglia, a Roman trattoria near the train station, which caters to many tourists, but serves a buffet appetizer that allows you to choose among almost 40 platters of fried-zucchini flowers, seafood salads, pasta salads, arugula with shrimp, and so on.

La Famiglia also introduced me to the considerable variety of pasta textures that didn’t survive immigration. When it comes to dried pasta, Italian restaurants don’t serve it al dente as we do, a little toothsome at the center; they serve spaghetti and linguine about half-cooked, when it just bends, and is still more crunchy than not. They also serve portions about one-third the size of an American entrée, with about one-fourth the toppings or sauce. This makes possible the four- or five-course structure of the traditional Italian feast, but of course most people only eat that way on special holidays. A meal at home would be antipasto and pasta for lunch; antipasto and protein course and salad for dinner. Servers in restaurants took no issue with our requests to divide portions or skip courses, or even with our barbaric practice of sometimes eating salad first.

Homemade pastas also have a variety of textures, from chewier than we like to soft-as-gnocchi. I had about four versions of pici, a fat, handmade Tuscan spaghetti. Three were as soft as your non-Italian-mom’s macaroni and cheese (but fresher tasting), and the fourth was chewy. A lasagna with mushrooms, homemade by the remarkable Rolanda, was based on silken sheets of pasta both thinner and softer than most Boston chefs can produce.

At the level of restaurant at which we were eating, there were only a few revelatory dishes, but they were overall remarkably good. We had a weak but edible spaghetti alla carbonara in Rome, offset by Rolanda’s brilliant version in Umbria, featuring thick, smoky bacon. We couldn’t buy a bad plate of seafood, even in landlocked and torrid roadside cafés.

Some new appetizer ideas, authentically Italian: thin-sliced smoked swordfish with lemon; grilled sliced vegetables served under melted smoked mozzarella; thin-sliced tripe in a salad with onions and lemon. A new dessert, something we had for breakfast in Florence: budino di riso, a sort of rice-pudding risotto in a pastry shell.

Italian restaurants in Italy don’t do much more with dessert than those in Boston, although the very fine trattoria La Porta, in Monticchiello, offered a rich, creamy panna cotta, with just enough bitter-chocolate sauce, that any Boston restaurant would envy. In the North End, we walk around the corner for pastry. In Italy, one does the same for divine gelato. Or not; I craved sweets very little in Italy, and gained no weight eating (at least a little) pasta at every meal. Despite a tour of the ultra-modern Perugina candy factory, now owned by Nestlé, I have little chocolate news of importance.

A sweet white wine called Moscadello di Montalcino in some years rivals Sauternes. Bitter soda, sort of like Campari without the alcohol, is quite nice on hot days. I’ve had it in the North End, so there is an importer. In Italy, there are numerous brands and bitter apéritifs other than Campari, such as Aperol, which is not so bitter, but still in the family (which Mrs. Nadeau — a non-Campari person — calls "the cough-syrup family").

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.