Why you should experience Pavé in Milan, Italy.
Pavé is a pioneering artisan pastry shop where Porta Venezia's cosmopolitan café culture, three friends' reinvention of the Milanese breakfast, French-inspired viennoiserie and a visible pastry laboratory converge around one of the city's defining contemporary bakery projects.
Set along Via Felice Casati near Via San Gregorio and just steps from Corso Buenos Aires, the original Pavé occupies a residential-commercial pocket between Porta Venezia and Repubblica, where neighborhood bars, independent businesses and early twentieth-century apartment buildings give the streets a lived-in scale beyond Milan's grand central avenues. PRINCIPIOATTIVO Architecture Group designed the 2012 interior around a pastry laboratory visible through glass, placing mixers and production directly beside the customer area, then softened that working environment with recovered and vintage furniture, mismatched chairs, communal tables and domestic-style seating. Croissants and cakes move from the laboratory into a room designed for lingering over breakfast, making the act of baking visible without turning the bakery into a formal pastry salon. The result is a Porta Venezia pastry shop where an open production laboratory, vintage furnishings and the relaxed cadence of a neighborhood living room give technically ambitious baking an unusually informal setting.
What you should know about Pavé.
Pavé is best known for Luca Scanni, Diego Bamberghi and Giovanni Giberti leaving established careers to rethink Milanese breakfast around artisan pastry and informality. Their project began in early 2011 after the three longtime friends discussed their dissatisfaction with work over wine and salumi, and by October they had secured the Via Felice Casati space that became Pavé in May 2012. Giberti and Bamberghi brought backgrounds in gastronomy, with Giberti taking the pastry role and Bamberghi handling the dining room, retail and supply chain; Scanni arrived from journalism and communication after time in Australia. Travel through London, Melbourne and San Francisco shaped their interest in a more international café culture, at a moment when high-level Italian pastry remained closely associated with formal service. Pavé challenged that convention by pairing serious production with youthful communication, contemporary graphics and a deliberately relaxed relationship between staff and customers. Recognition came almost immediately: Gambero Rosso began including Pavé among Italy's leading pastry and bar addresses from its first year, later awarding it Tre Tazzine and Tre Chicchi, and the New York Times singled it out during Expo Milano 2015. The founders expanded in 2016 with Pavé Gelati & Granite, recruiting gelataia Simona Carmagnola from De' Coltelli in Pisa and translating pastry ideas such as sbrisolona, tarte tatin and bread with butter and jam into frozen form. Pavé Break followed on Via della Commenda that July, extending the breakfast concept toward Porta Romana. A second gelateria arrived on Via Cadore in May 2021, and the gelato project repeatedly earned Gambero Rosso's Tre Coni. Another decisive investment came during the pandemic, when a new laboratory opened between 2020 and 2021 and brought the entire production cycle, from dough preparation through packaging, under Pavé's direct control. More than a decade after the founders' career change, the company had reached €4 million in annual revenue, and panettone had become a year-round product sold beyond Italy.
Laminated dough gives the Casati breakfast its clearest culinary sequence, beginning with croissants whose repeated layers of dough and butter create a crisp shell around a tender interior before fillings introduce fruit, cream or chocolate. Centosessanta became an early signature by filling the pastry with an apricot preserve whose name refers to using 160 grams of fruit to produce 100 grams of finished preserve, concentrating the fruit inside the buttery layers. Fresh pastry moves toward more elaborate constructions through Tonka, where almond shortcrust supports raw-pistachio frangipane, raspberry cream, fresh raspberries and white-chocolate mousse infused with tonka bean. Millefoglie changes the texture through crisp puff pastry, tonka chantilly and fresh raspberries, placing brittle layers against soft cream and tart fruit. Panettone carries Pavé's work with fermentation into a larger Milanese form produced throughout the year, with the traditional version joined seasonally by combinations such as candied apricot, candied lemon and tonka bean built on wheat flour, butter, egg yolk, sourdough and honey. Pavé Gelati completes the culinary arc through frozen reinterpretations of the pastry laboratory, turning familiar baked combinations into gelato and granita. Pavé develops breakfast through lamination, concentrated fruit, frangipane, infused cream, sourdough fermentation and frozen pastry ideas, giving each technique a distinct role within the founders' original ambition to make the first meal of the day worth lingering over.
How to fold Pavé into your trip.
Pavé works as the breakfast anchor for a Porta Venezia itinerary tracing the neighborhood from the redevelopment of former horse-tram territory through two exceptional works by Giovanni Battista Bossi into Piero Portaluppi's subterranean interpretation of metropolitan life.
Begin at Casa Galimberti, designed by Giovanni Battista Bossi between 1903 and 1905 for brothers Angelo and Emilio Galimberti on territory previously occupied by the Società Anonima degli Omnibus and its horse-tram infrastructure. The brothers were developers of the newly opened Via Malpighi, and Bossi turned their principal building into an exuberant Liberty composition through more than 170 square meters of fire-painted ceramic tiles by Pio Pinzauti and Ferdinando Brambilla, floral cement decoration and elaborate ironwork, joining new construction technology with one of Milan's richest early twentieth-century facades. Continue a few steps to Casa Guazzoni, commissioned from Bossi by master builder Giacomo Guazzoni and constructed between 1904 and 1906 on another portion of the former omnibus territory. Tarcisio Pogliani developed sculptural work for the facade, Paolo Sala contributed paintings and Alessandro Mazzucotelli is associated with its wrought iron, then restoration campaigns in 1982 and 1997 recovered interior decoration including putti, flowers and aquatic scenes around the extraordinary hexagonal staircase. Conclude at Albergo Diurno Venezia beneath Piazza Oberdan, where Piero Portaluppi developed an underground metropolitan complex between 1924 and 1926 for bathing, grooming and personal services at one of Milan's busiest gateways. The facility remained active across much of the twentieth century before closing in 2006, and its later stewardship by FAI preserved a rare surviving chapter of Portaluppi's work devoted to the rituals of urban travel and personal care. The progression moves from Bossi's ceramic-rich Casa Galimberti through the sculptural and wrought-iron complexity of Casa Guazzoni and culminates beneath Piazza Oberdan in Portaluppi's extraordinary subterranean environment.
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