I can't help it; I'm a sucker for it. Whenever there's the chance of eating really good Italian food I go for it. Maybe it's genetic, but to me, making an effort to find good food seems like a great idea. The rewards well repay the effort. It's often occurred to me that right there, there's a big difference in the attitude to food on the continent and the one that prevails - increasingly less - here in Ireland. Sourcing the best ingredients comes naturally to continentals, whether it's the endless search for the best restaurant or searching the markets for the freshest and the finest ingredients. Every small town has at least one bakery where you can get bread daily, or even twice a day; the idea of buying bread that has a shelf-life of five days is unknown. I know people in Italy who think nothing of doing a 200 kilometre round trip to buy a particular cheese, or to buy fish straight from the quays. That's like driving from Dublin to Portlaoise and back again - people would look at you oddly if you tried it here.

I've been biding my time waiting to go to Wexford town again, because this time I knew what was in store for me. A few years ago the only place in Dublin that I knew where good Italian food could be found was in the appropriately named 'Il Ristorante' in Dalkey. It was owned and run by Roberto Pons, a Ligurian chef, with his wife Celine. The food was wonderful, but this was before the advent of our booming economy and eventually they closed, much to my sadness. Roberto moved to the Shelbourne for a couple of years, but a little over a year ago he opened his new restaurant in Wexford, and he called it La Dolce Vita. I'd been waiting until we could meet our friends the Davisons in Wexford, and when the opportunity finally arose, we arranged to meet in La Dolce Vita. It's a pleasant, well-lit room with enough space at the tables to be comfortable, but its real strength is the quality of the food. I know that it's not my habit to go into minute detail when I describe the food in these reviews, but on this occasion I think I might, since I believe that the care that goes into every dish here deserves respect. While we waited for our starters we nibbled on the home-made bread and grissini - the bread sticks - and started on our wine, a 1996 Sauvignon Blanc from the Friuli in the North of Italy listed at £17. Curiously it had the label on upside down, prompting us to wonder was this designed for use in a bar like a bottle of spirits, or was it simply for export to Australia. I spent a little while examining the wine list, which does repay a careful look. It was Roberto who first introduced me a few years ago to a the Italian red wine Conero, and I retain a respect for his knowledge of wines. The wine list reflects his love of good wines, and although there's hardly a wine on it that costs more than £20, there are some really good ones all at under £20. Apart from restaurant classics like Soave, Orvieto, Barolo and Chianti there are rarer and less well known wines to choose from, gems like the San Lorenzo from the Marches, a Gewurztraminer from the Alto Adige and the big and robust Regaleali from Sicily. Although we'd intended to stay entirely on white wine, we couldn't resist a bottle of the Conero 1996, listed at £15.

The starters arrived and I became conscious that all conversation had come to a stand-still: the only noise at our table was the sound of cutlery on crockery accompanied by the occasional small groan of pleasure. Around the table happy people were tucking into a pancake stuffed with spinach and ricotta; pepperoni alla Piemontese, which are sweet peppers stuffed with garlic, tomato, anchovy and pine nuts; two bruschettas which came with cheese, vine tomatoes and anchovies; two plates of linguine in the classic Roman style of olive oil, garlic and chilli; and lastly a plate of calamari in zimino for me - that's squid cooked with spinach, tomato, wine and its own ink. After a while conversation resumed and we began tasting and sharing.

I'd made a decision at the start, that having come to Wexford to eat I was going to do it Italian style and have an antipasto, a pasta, and then a main course. Most of the others followed my example, so we got to taste a lot of different dishes. A couple of us chose the pasta e fagioli which is pasta cooked in broth with cannelini beans, a dish that was once the staple diet of the peasantry in southern Italy. If they ate it as good as this, life couldn't have been too hard. There was a plate of trenette - which is what square-cut pasta is called in the North of Italy - with seafood, and lastly a plate of rigatoni alla putanesca for me. That translates as pasta in the style of the streetwalkers, quite why it should be so called I don't know, but it's another classic from the South.

Then came the main courses - two plates of saltimbocca alla Romana, each was four slices of veal cooked in wine with sage and prosciutto; grilled king scallops with plum tomatoes and a thyme vinaigrette for three; rack of lamb roasted with garlic and rosemary; and stuffed quail for me. The saltimbocca, which means jump-in-the-mouth, was delicious, perfectly cooked and covered in a well-flavoured reduction sauce. It gets its name because this combination of flavours really does leap up at the palate when it's as well made as this. The ladies, who had all chosen the scallops, were sitting in front of plates big enough to be called platters, covered in fat, succulent scallops. I didn't get to taste the lamb, but my stuffed quail had me literally sucking the tiny bones to get the last scrap of meat, something that was probably expected, as it arrived with a finger bowl to accompany it.

Despite all the food I've just described some of us managed a dessert - a couple of Tiramisus, a tartlet with zabaglione nuts and candied fruit, and a Tre Tenori (three tenors) which was made from white, milk and dark chocolate. Coffee and a Fernet Branca for me finished this tour-de-force of Italian cooking. My only sadness is that La Dolce Vita isn't a lot closer to my home. Despite our Gargantuan appetites the bill came to £30 a head for one of the best Italian meals I've eaten outside of Italy.