Why you should experience Raboucer in Milan, Italy.
Raboucer is an unconventional cocktail bar where Ticinese's independent nightlife, the legacy of Milan's Bar Cuore, contemporary mixology and Andrea Pirola and Simone Di Gioia's hospitality project converge along Via Gian Giacomo Mora.
Set along Via Gian Giacomo Mora near Corso di Ticinese and just steps from Colonne di San Lorenzo, the bar occupies a narrow street where small restaurants and late-night venues extend behind one of Milan's oldest urban corridors, with Roman architecture, medieval churches and the evening crowds around Piazza Vetra all within the surrounding blocks. Graffiti, sofas, neon, table football, stairs and interconnected rooms give the interior the irregular character of a house assembled across multiple levels, with a secluded private room adding another layer deeper inside. Music remains integral after dark, supported by a wall opening that becomes a DJ position during dedicated evenings. The result is a Ticinese bar where the physical inheritance of a famous predecessor and a deliberately informal collection of rooms support an evening built around cocktails, music and prolonged social drinking.
What you should know about Raboucer.
Raboucer is best known for turning Andrea Pirola and Simone Di Gioia's separate careers behind some of Milan's influential cocktail counters into an independent hospitality business that has expanded through Ticinese since 2019. Bergamo-born Pirola entered professional mixology in 2012, then worked at Dry from 2013 to 2016 alongside Guglielmo Miriello before joining Marco Russo and Flavio Angiolillo at 1930 in 2017. Di Gioia arrived in Milan from Calabria in 2015 and moved through The Botanical Club on Via Melzo, Dry on Via Vittorio Veneto, Iter, 1930 and Doping Club, placing both bartenders inside the professional circle surrounding Flavio Angiolillo's MAG group before they became business partners. Pirola and Di Gioia acquired Bar Cuore in 2019, preserving its famous reversed neon sign and deriving Raboucer from “Bar Cuore” read backward, turning a physical remnant of the previous venue into the name of their new project. Their first year led directly into the Covid period, yet the business survived and became the foundation for a wider neighborhood operation. October 2022 brought the acquisition of Tasca, the long-running tapas bar nearby on Corso di Ticinese, where the partners retained Spanish staples and broadened the kitchen toward Italian dishes and wines. A further expansion arrived in early 2025 through La Gastronomia, created near Tasca as a preparation kitchen serving both businesses and as a separate operation for Mediterranean cooking, takeaway, delivery, catering and external events. Raboucer changed internally during the same period through the addition of a secluded room with its own bar, extending the original venue into a larger sequence of interconnected spaces. The progression from two bartending careers to Raboucer, Tasca and La Gastronomia turned a single 2019 takeover into a three-part hospitality operation concentrated around Colonne di San Lorenzo.
Drink Tape gave the cocktail program one of its most elaborate creative chapters in 2022 through seven signature drinks paired with seven songs and presented through a vinyl record connected to a Spotify playlist. Goodbye Bluesky paired Pink Floyd with BlueCoat Gin, lemon, lavender and milk-washed oolong tea, using clarification to change the texture of a combination built around citrus, botanicals and tea. Con il Nastro Rosa moved toward Lucio Battisti through Florio Marsala, Zacapa 23, gum, licorice and caper, placing fortified wine and aged rum against saline and herbal elements. Noi, Loro, gli Altri joined Don Julio Blanco and Casamigos Mezcal with lacto-fermented pineapple and tonka bean before oak smoke completed a drink linked to Marracash and Fabri Fibra. The bar replaced that musical structure in 2025 with Ciak, a six-cocktail menu drawing its names and concepts from film and television. Hannibal entered the new sequence through a darker cinematic reference, as the wider menu moved between stronger signatures and lower-alcohol combinations. The shift from Drink Tape to Ciak preserved Pirola and Di Gioia's practice of rebuilding the cocktail menu around a complete cultural theme, first through music and later through cinema.
How to fold Raboucer into your trip.
Raboucer works as the evening culmination for a Ticinese walk tracing imperial Milan, Renaissance patronage and the postwar creation of a green corridor between two of the city's oldest basilicas.
Begin at Basilica di San Lorenzo Maggiore, constructed between the late fourth and early fifth centuries along the Roman Via Ticinensis when Mediolanum stood among the principal centers of the Western Roman Empire. Its vast central plan ranked among the most ambitious architectural projects of late antiquity in the West, and the adjoining Sant'Aquilino chapel preserves early Christian mosaics before Martino Bassi directed reconstruction after the main dome collapsed in 1573, carrying the ancient complex into another architectural chapter. Continue to Museo di Sant'Eustorgio, where the former Dominican monastery and its adjoining basilica preserve an early Christian burial ground, a thirteenth-century chapter house, a grand sacristy built in 1565 and the fifteenth-century Portinari Chapel. Pigello Portinari commissioned the chapel from 1462 as a funerary and devotional project, Vincenzo Foppa covered its interior with Renaissance frescoes and Giovanni di Balduccio's fourteenth-century marble ark of Saint Peter Martyr became its sculptural centerpiece, joining Florentine patronage with Milanese painting and an earlier Gothic masterpiece. Conclude at Parco Papa Giovanni Paolo II, whose present landscape emerged from the twentieth-century clearing of the densely built and polluted territory behind San Lorenzo before Pier Fausto Bagatti Valsecchi and Antonio Grandi developed a postwar green connection toward Sant'Eustorgio. Their 1956 project conceived the park as an archaeological promenade between the two basilicas, Colonne di San Lorenzo and the surviving remains of Milan's Roman amphitheater, converting territory once occupied by tanners, waterways and dense housing into a 40,700-square-meter green corridor through Ticinese. The progression moves from San Lorenzo's imperial-scale late-antique architecture through Pigello Portinari, Vincenzo Foppa and Giovanni di Balduccio's convergence at Sant'Eustorgio into Bagatti Valsecchi and Grandi's postwar transformation of the territory between the basilicas into a continuous archaeological promenade.
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