Book a nonstop to Italy this summer, and the surprise is where the newest flights actually go; not Rome, not Venice. The routes U.S. airlines have added fastest drop you in Sicily, in Naples, in the heel of the boot. Americans still have their pick of flights to the marquee cities, but the new routes, the first-ever ones, and the extra flights are aimed at the country you go to for the food.
The capitals are covered. Delta is adding Seattle to Rome for 2026, and the classic gateways keep their daily service. The difference is in what is genuinely new. Across the three largest U.S. carriers, the newest routes to Italy nearly all land in Sicily, Campania and Puglia, southern and island regions better known for their cooking than their ruins. The postcard cities hold steady, but the growth is going to food country.
Where the new flights actually go
Delta made the boldest early move by opening Sicily. Its daily New York-JFK service to Catania began in May 2025 as the first-ever nonstop between the United States and Sicily, and the only direct connection to the island. Matteo Curcio, Delta’s senior vice president for Europe, tied the route to demand, noting that Sicily is a sought-after destination and that many Italian Americans hold strong ties to the region.
What waits at the other end is a food city with few equals. At La Pescheria, Catania’s morning fish market, vendors sell swordfish and sea urchin steps from the boats that landed them. The local arancino comes in the shape of a cone, molded after Mount Etna, stuffed with ragu and molten cheese. The volcano’s black soil produces Etna DOC wines and the prized green pistachios of nearby Bronte. Breakfast, in summer, is almond granita scooped into a warm brioche.
Delta also flies New York and Atlanta to Naples, and for 2026, it pulled its JFK-Naples service forward to late March to meet year-round demand for southern Italy. The carrier now serves Rome, Milan, Venice, Naples and Catania, making it the largest U.S. airline into the country.
Naples is the trend at its most recognizable. It is the birthplace of pizza, the blistered, folded Neapolitan pie that carries its own protected status. The surrounding Campania supplies the mozzarella di bufala and San Marzano tomatoes that anchor the plate, both tied by protected designation to specific soil. American Airlines flies its own seasonal nonstop from Chicago to Naples, and Delta feeds the city from two hubs. For an American traveler, Naples is no longer a train transfer out of Rome.
The newest of these routes goes somewhere most Americans have never considered flying. United opened the only nonstop service between the United States and Bari on May 1, 2026, with its Newark flight running four times a week.
Bari is the gateway to Puglia, the heel of the boot, where the food is as plain and precise as the whitewashed towns. This is the region that invented burrata, where grandmothers still shape orecchiette by hand on doorstep tables, and where the olive groves supply a large share of Italy’s oil. United also resumed its Newark-Palermo service to western Sicily. Between Bari and Palermo, United runs the only U.S. flights to two of Italy’s most distinct food regions.
What food has to do with it
The demand behind these routes is measurable. Foreign food and wine tourism in Italy has grown 176% over the past decade, with international visitors spending almost 365 million euros on these experiences in a single year, according to ENIT, the Italian national tourist board. The sector has moved from a niche pursuit in the early 2000s to an established reason foreigners choose Italy at all.
ENIT ties that demand directly to Italy’s exports: the countries that buy the most Italian food and wine are also the ones that visit the most. It’s a pattern that pushes travelers past the marquee cities and into the inland areas where the products come from. It helps explain why a U.S. carrier now runs daily flights to a city like Naples that it once treated as a connection.
For many Americans, the draw is also personal. About 16 million Americans reported Italian ancestry in the 2022 American Community Survey, roughly 4.8% of the country. The overwhelming majority descend from the wave of more than 4 million Italians who left the Mezzogiorno, southern Italy and Sicily, between 1880 and 1914, arriving as Neapolitans, Sicilians, Calabrians and Pugliesi before they became Italian Americans. The regions that those families left, Campania, Sicily and Puglia, are the same ones the new flights now serve. Roots tourism, travelers tracing their family back to a specific village, gives a U.S. visitor a reason to skip the standard circuit for a town with their surname in the church register.
What Italy wants to happen
The airlines follow the same direction as the Italian government. ENIT, the national tourist board, has built its strategy around dispersing visitors away from Rome, Florence and Venice and toward borghi, the trulli of Puglia, and the nuraghi of Sardinia. Every new U.S. flight into a food region advances that goal, routing American arrivals and American dollars into the regions Italy is trying to fill.
There is a reason to book sooner rather than later. New transatlantic routes tend to come with cheaper introductory fares and more award seats before they fill, and several of these southern services are only in their first or second season. Book into Bari, Catania or Naples now, and you get a region where the food carries a designation and a history, shorter queues than at the Colosseum and lower fares, while the route is still new. Italy’s tourism board has said openly that it wants visitors to spread beyond Rome and Venice. For now, the flights are heading where the government wants them.
Mandy is a luxury travel, fine dining and bucket-list-adventure journalist with expert insight from 47 countries. She uncovers unforgettable experiences around the world and brings them to life through immersive storytelling that blends indulgence, culture and discovery, and shares them with a global audience as co-founder of Food Drink Life. Her articles appear on MSN and through the Associated Press wire in major U.S. outlets, including NBC, the Daily News, Boston Herald, the Chicago Sun-Times and many more.