Why you should experience Rita Cocktails in Milan, Italy.
Rita Cocktails is a pioneering American bar where Navigli's aperitivo culture meets Edoardo Nono's unconventional route through international hospitality, Gianluca Chiaruttini's founding partnership and more than two decades of fresh-ingredient mixology around a horseshoe counter that helped change how Milan drinks.
Set along Via Angelo Fumagalli near Ripa di Ticinese and just steps from Naviglio Grande, the bar occupies a compact 70-square-meter room hidden just beyond the canal's busiest promenade. A 2016 redesign pulled the wooden counter into the center of the premises and reduced table space, placing the bartenders at the focal point of a room backed by 500 spirits and 80 gins at the time. The counter-centered layout keeps preparation close to the drinker, reinforcing the relationship between bartender, fresh produce and cocktail that Nono established during Rita's earliest years. Aperitivo extends that interaction into the early evening, with pinzimonio, focaccia cunzata, olives and potato chips accompanying cocktails before the kitchen continues later into the night. The result is a Navigli bar where a small side-street address, concentrated room and produce-driven drinks service preserve the intimacy at the center of Rita's approach to cocktails.
What you should know about Rita Cocktails.
Rita Cocktails is best known for Edoardo Nono and Gianluca Chiaruttini opening a classical American bar in 2002 around fresh juices, seasonal produce and house preparations at a moment when Milanese cocktail service remained heavily dependent on premixes, commercial syrups and powdered ingredients. Nono reached that decision through a career that began almost accidentally. Born in Varese in 1969, he studied telecommunications and started waiting tables at the Passatore tennis club on Lake Varese in 1988 to finance his holidays. Four resort seasons accelerated his development, and by 1992 the twenty-three-year-old was directing a fifteen-person bar brigade. Cruise-ship work took him to America. Other periods followed in Melegnano, Rimini, Covignano and Lausanne, with Nono completing Hotel Management studies in Rimini and later working at Four Seasons Milano before returning permanently to bartending. He had met Chiaruttini while working at Lido di Luino in 1993, creating the partnership that would eventually produce Rita. Another decisive artifact arrived in 1998 when Nono developed Gin Zen in Milan. Fresh ginger was still uncommon behind the city's bars, and his combination of crushed ginger, gin, lime and soda became the drink most closely associated with his later venue. Nono and Chiaruttini opened Rita on December 12, 2002. Their reference point was the classical bar culture associated with German bartender Charles Schumann, yet their production method drew strongly on the emerging American revival of fresh ingredients, infusions and kitchen-adjacent preparation. Juices were squeezed daily. Fruit and vegetables entered both liquids and garnishes, and house production gradually expanded to use multiple parts of individual plants. The bar became a training ground as well. Michele Zilio won Barawards' Bartender Under 30 prize in 2015 during his Rita tenure, and Rita itself won the publication's Cocktail Bar of the Year award in 2017. Chiara Buzzi joined the group as director in 2018 and became a partner in Rita & Cocktails in 2022, taking responsibility for communications, events and external relations. Andrea Arcaini joined the Rita family in 2019 and now directs mixology across Rita Cocktails and Rita's Tiki Room under Nono's supervision. Twenty-four years after the original opening, Rita entered the inaugural Europe's 50 Best Bars ranking in 2026 at No. 49, adding an international recognition to a project still operating from the Via Fumagalli room where Nono and Chiaruttini began.
Gin Zen preserves the clearest connection with Nono's early work through London Dry gin, fresh ginger, raw cane sugar, lime juice, lime cordial and soda. Mezzadro moves toward bitterness through white acquavite, Campari, red wine and cassis. Tomato Platter crosses Roku gin with Junmai sake, Ginger Falernum, tomato and yuzu juice, wasabi, salt, pepper and teriyaki sauce, turning fresh produce into the structural center of the drink. Discovery joins Tassoni Gin Superfine with aquavit, Italicus, yuzu, dill syrup and cedrata. Ago, filo e nodo starts with Hendrick's gin flavored with tepache, then adds Yaguara cachaça and lime cordial. Sciangai combines reposado tequila and Japanese whisky with Amaro Montenegro, banana cordial and soda. Nuvola develops a softer texture from Roku gin, Pisco Acholado, orgeat, lemon, kefir and aquafaba. Moka Express is composed for two drinkers, mixing ten-year rye whiskey and Cuban rum with moka coffee, cocoa, vanilla and salted-caramel syrup. Chiodo pushes deeper into aged spirits through Laphroaig 10, Hennessy VS, Martini Ambrato, white bitter, triple sec and banana bubbles. Sou Ellen rests in the barrel before service, joining London Dry gin, Campari, chinotto and red vermouth. The kitchen extends Rita's house-production philosophy through its own giardiniera, beef-and-pork meatballs with fennel and marinara, house xiao mai, a Piemontese beef burger with Rita's red mayonnaise and potato chips with Parmigiano. Gin Zen remains the throughline, keeping the ginger-driven drink Nono developed in 1998 beside a contemporary menu built from cordials, fermentation, fresh juice, infusions and barrel aging.
How to fold Rita Cocktails into your trip.
Rita Cocktails works as the evening endpoint for an afternoon tracing the Navigli from the engineering that carried Duomo marble into medieval Milan through the canal labor of later centuries and the Renaissance patronage concentrated around Sant'Eustorgio.
Begin at Conca di Viarenna, where engineers Aristotele Fioravanti and Filippo da Modena created an early double-lock system in 1438 to overcome the change in water level between the Naviglio Grande approach and Milan's internal moat. Barges carrying Candoglia marble for the Duomo passed through the waterway toward the cathedral works. Spanish-wall construction destroyed the first lock in 1555, and Cristoforo Lombardo and Vincenzo Seregni of the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo built its successor between 1556 and 1558. Continue to Vicolo dei Lavandai, whose surviving stone washing slabs preserve the infrastructure of commercial laundry beside Naviglio Grande. Male workers organized through the Confraternita dei Lavandai di Milano during the eighteenth century originally gave the alley its name, collecting linen from Milanese households and washing it along the canal before women increasingly performed the work. A stream fed directly by Naviglio Grande supplied the washhouse, and an early twentieth-century centrifuge survives at number six. Conclude at Cappella Portinari, commissioned around 1462 by Pigello Portinari after the Florentine banker moved to Milan to direct the local branch of the Medici bank. The square-plan chapel rises beneath a sixteen-section dome, and Vincenzo Foppa covered its walls between 1462 and 1468 with scenes devoted to the Virgin and Saint Peter Martyr. Giovanni di Balduccio's fourteenth-century marble ark of Saint Peter Martyr later entered the chapel, placing Tuscan sculpture beside one of Foppa's defining Renaissance cycles. The progression moves from fifteenth-century hydraulic engineering for the Duomo through the organized labor sustained by Naviglio Grande into Portinari's Medici-era patronage and Foppa's painting, tracing the commercial and artistic forces surrounding Rita Cocktails.
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