Biancolatte, Milan

Why you should experience Biancolatte in Milan, Italy.

Biancolatte is a whimsical all-day café where Porta Nuova's polished residential quarter meets the Di Sarro family's affection for childhood comforts, homemade sweets and a modern interpretation of the traditional Italian latteria.

Set along Via Filippo Turati near Via Moscova and just steps from the Giardini Indro Montanelli, the café occupies a Central Milan pocket where neoclassical residences and garden-fronted institutions soften the transition between Brera and Porta Nuova. Architect Andrea Rossini conceived the interior as a house, filling predominantly white rooms with domestic furniture, shelves, lamps and objects that dissolve conventional boundaries between café, restaurant and shop. The gelateria and pastry displays establish the sweeter side of the operation near the entrance, before tables extend deeper into rooms conceived for longer meals. Soft furnishings, suspended decorations and small domestic objects reinforce the impression of moving through an inhabited home whose components happen to accommodate breakfast, lunch and dinner. The result is a Porta Nuova café whose domestic scale gives an unusually coherent physical form to an operation spanning coffee, pastry, gelato and Italian home cooking.

What you should know about Biancolatte.

Biancolatte is best known for Ludovica and Valentina Di Sarro's transformation of a close family's interests in marketing, pastry and hospitality into a Milan concept that began taking form in 2007. Their mother Simona drew the three-spoon logo, Ludovica supplied the Biancolatte name through her interest in image and marketing, and Valentina brought a particular enthusiasm for pastry, giving separate family roles direct influence over the emerging project. Architect Andrea Rossini entered when the family decided the premises should resemble a home and a contemporary latteria; the search ended with a long-closed hair salon that Rossini converted for the new operation. Biancolatte opened its gelateria and caffetteria on June 5, 2008, then added the restaurant room known as La Latteria that September, turning the initial sweet-and-coffee business into an all-day hospitality format. Demand pushed the family toward another major change in 2010, when the premises doubled in size and gained a retail shop carrying the domestic concept beyond food service. Ludovica and Valentina remained the owners, with the sisters subsequently extending Biancolatte into catering, retail projects and the Hugs offshoot devoted to plush toys. A long relationship with Alice for Children added another strand to the family project: Ludovica Di Sarro joined the organization as a supporting member, and Biancolatte has contributed products, fundraising activity and hospitality support to its programs for children in Kenya.

Breakfast opens with cappuccino beside croissants, cakes and biscuits produced around the pastry side of the house, placing milk and baked dough at the center of the morning service. Pancakes introduce a softer, warmer texture for brunch, accompanied by combinations that move through fruit, chocolate and syrups before yogurt and granola provide a cooler alternative. Gelato returns milk to the concept in frozen form, joined by cakes and pastries whose production gives the café its strongest connection to Valentina's original interest in sweets. Paccheri al pomodoro gain burrata in the house preparation, pairing warm pasta and tomato acidity with cool, creamy cheese. Zucchini flowers carry a soft cheese filling, and breaded mozzarella arrives as small carrozzine beside salad or crisp potatoes. Cacio e pepe, saffron pasta with artichokes and speck, and whole-grain trenette with zucchini pesto, basil and almonds carry the service into lunch and dinner, completing an all-day sequence that begins with milk, pastry and coffee before developing into recognizable Italian home cooking.

How to fold Biancolatte into your trip.

Biancolatte works as the breakfast or afternoon endpoint for an exploration of the gardens east of Via Filippo Turati, where aristocratic patronage, eighteenth-century painting and postwar architecture created an unusually concentrated sequence of Milanese cultural spaces.

Begin at Palazzo Dugnani, where Giuseppe Casati transformed an earlier residence after acquiring it in 1730 and commissioned Giambattista Tiepolo to fresco the principal salon the following year. Tiepolo developed the Stories of Scipio across the walls and the Apotheosis of Scipio overhead, among his first major commissions beyond Venetian territory; the Dugnani family acquired the palace in 1753, and Giovanni Vimercati later installed his natural-history collection there before the property and collection passed to Milan during the nineteenth century. Continue to Villa Reale, commissioned by Count Ludovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso from Leopoldo Pollack and constructed between 1790 and 1796 as a neoclassical residence enriched by a sculptural program devised by Giuseppe Parini. French rule subsequently brought Gioacchino Murat, Napoleon and Viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais into its history, and the municipality acquired the complex during the twentieth century before establishing the Galleria d'Arte Moderna within its rooms. Conclude at PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, which Ignazio Gardella designed between 1947 and 1954 on the site of Villa Reale's bomb-damaged former stables. Gardella developed the pavilion as a purpose-built home for temporary contemporary-art exhibitions; the building was devastated by the Via Palestro bombing in 1993 and reconstructed by Ignazio and Jacopo Gardella, restoring one of postwar Milan's most consequential exhibition buildings. The progression moves from Tiepolo's eighteenth-century transformation of aristocratic interiors through Pollack and Parini's neoclassical synthesis of architecture and sculpture into Gardella's postwar exhibition architecture and its reconstruction after the 1993 bombing, compressing three centuries of Milanese cultural patronage around the gardens near Biancolatte.

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