Why you should experience Old Fox Pub in Milan, Italy.
Old Fox Pub is a storied British pub where Sant'Agostino's neighborhood character, Renato Carzaniga's early commitment to British and Irish beer, four decades of Milanese drinking culture and a newer generation of local brewing converge around dark timber, draught taps and a remarkably enduring corner address.
Set along Piazza Sant'Agostino near Via Cesare da Sesto and just steps from the Sant'Agostino metro station, the pub occupies a western-central district where residential streets meet the former monastic territory surrounding San Vittore al Corpo. Dark wooden furnishings, counter stools and closely arranged tables preserve the visual language of a traditional British pub, with beer taps remaining the physical center of a room shaped more by repeated local use than periodic redesign. Football and rugby screenings, live music and Saint Patrick's Day celebrations extend drinking into communal ritual, maintaining the social role that has accompanied the address across successive generations of Milanese customers. The result is a Sant'Agostino pub whose longevity comes through continuity, keeping British beer culture and neighborhood sociability active at the same Milanese corner since the late 1970s.
What you should know about Old Fox Pub.
Old Fox Pub is best known for Renato Carzaniga and his family establishing Milan's longest-running Anglo-Saxon pub, with an unofficial beginning in 1974 followed by continuous operation at Piazza Sant'Agostino from 1979. Carzaniga built its early drinking culture around high-fermentation beers imported from England and dark Irish styles, introducing Milanese customers to traditions still uncommon in the city's bars during the period. The pub developed a remarkably broad social history without abandoning its original British character, attracting neighborhood regulars alongside Eric Clapton, Max Pezzali and later Brenda Lodigiani and Mecna. A new generation eventually brought Daniele Martinelli, Diego Galuppi, Ruben Glorio and chef Mark Broadhead into central roles across brewing, whisky, bar service and food. Martinelli extended the Fox beyond Piazza Sant'Agostino when his brewing experiments led to the creation of Birrificio Barona in late 2015 with Emiliano Pastore, Gabriele Glorio and Aldo Spaini. The brewery established production in Milan's Barona district, tying the pub to a local source of craft beer after decades built around British and Irish drinking traditions. Galuppi developed the whisky and distillate selection and forged a partnership with South Tyrolean distiller Psenner, adding specialist spirits work beside the expanding beer program. Glorio took responsibility as publican for the taps and contemporary drinks selection, connecting the established room with a younger generation behind the counter. Broadhead arrived after professional experience in MICHELIN-starred kitchens in England and brought a no-waste philosophy into a food program still grounded in British pub cooking. Saint Patrick's Day 2026 concentrated those strands into a single celebration with live Irish folk music, Broadhead's stout beef stew and sticky Baileys pudding, plus Danny Boy, an oatmeal stout produced by Birrificio Barona with Milanese water.
More than twenty house craft beers now connect the taps at Piazza Sant'Agostino with Martinelli's brewing project across the city. Madoonina Modern Pils takes a crisp lager route, Magdalene English IPA moves through malt and persistent bitterness, and Arsoora Storm Fruit IPA introduces mango into the brewery's contemporary range. Danny Boy shifts toward Ireland through an oatmeal stout brewed with Milanese water, drawing the pub's long association with Irish beer into local production. Galuppi's spirits work adds whisky beside those taps, broadening a selection developed through specialist sourcing and the Psenner partnership. Broadhead carries the British connection into food through fish and chips, bangers and mash and other pub preparations shaped by his years in English kitchens. Chicken and bacon pie joins chicken, mushrooms and bacon inside pastry, and haggis with neeps and tatties pushes the selection further into Scottish cooking through lamb, oats, turnip, mashed potatoes and whisky sauce. Beer, whisky and British food consequently operate as connected parts of a house tradition that began with Carzaniga's imported ales and now includes beer brewed within Milan itself.
How to fold Old Fox Pub into your trip.
Old Fox Pub works as the evening endpoint for an afternoon tracing Sant'Agostino through nineteenth-century Milanese industry, Renaissance religious reconstruction and the postwar creation of Italy's principal science and technology museum.
Begin at Casa Candiani, where architect Luigi Broggi created the principal residence of the Candiani family between 1882 and 1885 beside the furnaces and worker housing of Carlo Candiani e C. The richly worked terracotta exterior doubled as a demonstration of the family company's production, with pilasters, bifore, friezes, capitals and sculptural decoration turning the building itself into a display of an industry whose work also supplied terracotta for Milan's Museo di Storia Naturale. Continue to San Vittore al Corpo, where the Olivetan monks began a sweeping sixteenth-century reconstruction after taking possession of a religious complex rooted in an earlier Christian burial area and fourth-century imperial mausoleum. Vincenzo Seregni participated in the new church project, Galeazzo Alessi shaped its later development, and seventeenth-century decoration brought Camillo Procaccini, Ambrogio Figino, Daniele Crespi and Guglielmo Caccia into one of Milan's richest late Renaissance interiors. Conclude at Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, created through engineer Guido Ucelli's decades-long effort to establish a national institution devoted to science, technology and industry. The museum opened on February 15, 1953 inside the former Olivetan monastery with a major Leonardo exhibition marking five centuries since his birth, occupying a complex that had passed through Napoleonic hospital use, Austrian and Italian military occupation and severe wartime bombing before postwar reconstruction gave it a new cultural purpose. The progression moves from Broggi and the Candiani family's nineteenth-century industrial compound through Seregni, Alessi and Lombard painters at San Vittore into Ucelli's postwar science museum, concentrating several distinct chapters of western-Central Milan around Old Fox Pub.
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