Tuscan cuisine draws heavily from the region's peasant tradition when resourceful Tuscan women created miracles from "poor" ingredients like beans, wheat, vegetables and olive oil. Nowadays, with the standard of living significantly higher, meat (formerly only available to Tuscan elites) has made its way onto nearly every table, giving visitors a great array of dishes to choose from.

Any restaurant, or cook worth his/her salt will hand roll their pasta. In Tuscany, local specialities include thick spaghetti-like pici (made with only water and flour), ravioli, and tagliatelle. You can taste the sturdy texture of the dough, served all'aglione (with a spicy red garlic sauce), with ragu (a meat sauce), or (in season) with porcini mushrooms.

Soups are standard fare in Tuscany and ribollita, a soup combining old bread, beans and vegetables (literally meaning "reboiled"), is a testament to the famous Tuscan resourcefulness. In the summer, Tuscans move away from these heavier bean soups to lighter fare, such as bruschetta and panzanella, a regional comfort food made by soaking stale bread in olive oil and vinegar and mixing it into a tomato paste.

Pork is the traditional peasant staple, as each family would slaughter one pig each winter and cure it for consumption throughout the year. Nowadays, visitors can still expect to taste a marvellous array of prosciuttos, but Tuscans are not limited to cured meats. Traditional dishes like wild boar, generally stewed for hours until it reaches a point of soft deliciousness, still abound. Many restaurants serve beef from the local chianina cow, the premium cut being the generously-proportioned bistecca alla fiorentina, the region's signature .

The Tuscans are not renowned for their sweet teeth and many meals end with a selection of locally grown fruit including cherries, strawberries, peaches, plums, figs and grapes. On special occasions and in restaurants you can find panna cotta (a pudding-like dish), tiramisu and fruit tarts. Of course, gelato, in a dizzying array of flavours, is available in gelaterias in every small town. The annual international gelato champion has his shop in San Gimignano.

Chianti, the famous wine native to Tuscany, is as variable as it is versatile, and while there's plenty of mass-produced cheap wine out there, the vintners of the Chianti Classico zone in the hills between Florence and Siena craft excellent wines of the highest quality.

Chianti is without a doubt the most well known of all Italian wines. There may be only one denomination - Chianti D.O.C.G - but there are many different styles, ranging from light Beaujolais-style quaffing wines to structured, complex wines with enough backbone to reward ageing and maturing.

The predominant grape variety is Sangiovese, but the laws allow for the addition of between 10 and 15% Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah. A Riserva wine is one that has been aged longer before being released; it should come from a good year and benefit from further ageing, although it is not always the guarantee of quality that might reasonably be expected.

The vineyards of Chianti are scattered over much of central Tuscany; the Classico zone begins north of Siena and reaches most of the way to Florence. This zone generally produces the best wine.