Why you should experience Piz in Milan, Italy.
Piz is an exuberant pizzeria where Centro Storico's commercial intensity, Pasquale Pometto's Calabrian roots, Neapolitan pizza craft and pop-art exuberance converge inside a Via Torino institution built around rebellious simplicity.
Set along Via Torino near Via Valpetrosa and just steps from Civico Tempio di San Sebastiano, the pizzeria occupies a recessed passage on the historic route between Piazza del Duomo and Carrobbio, surrounded by medieval churches, Renaissance palazzi and one of Central Milan's busiest shopping streets. Lemon-yellow and orange walls, multicolored furnishings, Keith Haring-inspired figures and a visible wood-fired oven fill the ground floor before the restaurant descends into a second dining room, giving the compact address a deliberately saturated visual character. Queues regularly extend into the passage outside, where small pieces of Pometto's pizza-bread creation and sparkling wine turn the wait into part of the arrival before the movement continues through the tightly arranged rooms. The result is a Centro Storico pizzeria where intense color, a working wood oven, street-side anticipation and Pometto's deliberately theatrical hospitality give an extremely concise pizza concept an outsized presence in Central Milan.
What you should know about Piz.
Piz is best known for Pasquale Pometto, the German-born son of a Calabrian family whose career moved from teenage pizzaiolo to national competition winner, multi-city entrepreneur and one of the distinctive figures in Milan's modern pizza scene. Born in Cologne in 1977 and connected through his family to Caloveto in Calabria, Pometto attended hotel school and began making pizza professionally at fourteen. Florence became his first major entrepreneurial chapter after he created Pizza Man in 2001 from a small takeaway operation on Viale De Amicis and expanded the business across Florence and Prato. The growth reached eight locations, and Pometto won an Italian pizza championship in 2004 during the same period. His work also carried him far beyond Tuscany through pizza-making trips in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela and California, including an event organized for Italian emigrants in Venezuela. Pometto eventually sold the Florence pizzerias and Pizza Man brand to his employees before relocating his entrepreneurial focus to Milan, where Pizza AM followed in 2013. Piz became his next major project, translating years of expansion into an intentionally concentrated concept centered on only a few pizzas. Within two months, the Via Torino restaurant had climbed to first place among more than six thousand Milan restaurants on Tripadvisor, giving the new business immediate international visibility. Pometto subsequently developed the Pomet from the pizza bread already offered to people waiting outside his restaurants and dedicated an adjoining Via Valpetrosa business to the creation in 2018, physically linking that project with Piz through the internal courtyard used by staff. Gambero Rosso continues to recognize Pometto's wider Milan work through Pizza AM, which received its Foglia distinction and a 79/100 evaluation in 2025. His progression from teenage baker through Pizza Man, national competition success, international pizza work, Pizza AM, Piz and Pomet establishes a career in which each new business emerged from techniques or hospitality practices developed during the preceding one.
Pometto builds the dough with his own fermentation method, combining his starter, which he calls lievito nonna, with a small quantity of brewer's yeast adjusted to the season before a resting period reaching forty-eight hours. Warmth and humidity from steam form another part of his approach to fermentation. Handwork follows a similarly personal rule: Pometto massages the dough during shaping, preserving the internal structure before it enters the wood-fired oven. Margherita joins San Marzano DOP tomatoes with fresh fiordilatte, extra-virgin olive oil, basil and Grana Padano DOP. Marinara keeps the tomato base but adds crushed garlic and wild Calabrian oregano, connecting the pizza directly with Pometto's southern Italian heritage. Delicata Bianca removes tomato and brings fiordilatte together with poppy seeds, chives and Grana Padano. A changing pizza selected by the pizzaiolo supplies the sole variable position in the principal selection. Birrino Pometto extends Pometto's name into a double-malt beer brewed in Calabria with chestnuts and chestnut honey, joining his pizza technique with another product carrying a direct connection to his family region.
How to fold Piz into your trip.
Piz works as the meal anchor for a Centro Storico itinerary tracing Renaissance experiments in architectural perspective, a civic response to sixteenth-century plague and Federico Borromeo's creation of one of early modern Europe's great intellectual institutions.
Begin at Santa Maria presso San Satiro, whose surviving religious nucleus reaches the ninth-century sacellum founded under Archbishop Ansperto before Gian Galeazzo Sforza and Bona di Savoia initiated the major Renaissance church during the 1470s. Donato Bramante entered the project during the following decade and confronted the restricted eastern site with his celebrated illusionistic choir, compressing an apparent deep apse into a shallow physical space through modeled perspective, as Agostino de Fondulis contributed terracotta decoration and Giovanni Antonio Amadeo worked on the unfinished facade project. Continue to Civico Tempio di San Sebastiano, initiated by Milanese governor the Marquis of Ayamonte as a civic votive response to the plague and begun in 1577 from a design by Pellegrino Tibaldi, Carlo Borromeo's favored architect. Tibaldi developed the unusual circular plan before leaving for Spain in 1586, after which Giuseppe Meda enlarged the principal chapel, Pietro Antonio Barca directed construction of the drum and dome from 1599 and Fabio Mangone added a deeper presbytery around 1616 to 1617, extending the project across four major architectural careers. Conclude at Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, founded by Cardinal Federico Borromeo in 1607 and inaugurated on December 8, 1609 as one of the earliest libraries in Europe open to anyone able to read and write. Borromeo sent agents across Europe and the eastern Mediterranean in pursuit of manuscripts, assembled scholars around the collection and subsequently established the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in 1618; the institution now holds Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus alongside works associated with Raphael, Caravaggio, Botticelli, Titian and Bruegel. The progression moves from Bramante's manipulation of perspective at Santa Maria presso San Satiro through Tibaldi, Meda, Barca and Mangone's multigenerational construction of San Sebastiano into Federico Borromeo's Ambrosiana and its union of books, manuscripts, scholarship and major works of art.
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