La Pergola

Perched atop Monte Mario, Rome's highest hill, La Pergola gazes out over St Peter's, the Colosseum and a sea of red-tiled roofs — and it's been Rome's sole three-star restaurant since 2005, the first the city ever had. The improbable hero is Chef Heinz Beck, a Bavarian who arrived in 1994 meaning to stay a couple of years and is still here three decades later, having quietly become one of the maestros of Italian gastronomy. His cooking is classic and hyper-technical but never static, increasingly bent toward a lighter, health-minded style; the one dish he'll never retire is the fagottelli "La Pergola," his ingenious riff on carbonara. The cellar runs to tens of thousands of bottles, including vintages from the early twentieth century, and the room was lavishly restyled in 2024. Book months out, dress the part, and let the sun set over Rome.