Why you should experience Sherazade Shisha in Milan, Italy.
Sherazade Shisha is an intimate hookah lounge where Porta Venezia's international character, Middle Eastern café culture, Moroccan tea service and late-night social life converge behind the commercial intensity of Corso Buenos Aires.
Set along Via Plinio near Via Alessandro Tadino and just steps from Piazza Lima, the lounge occupies a side street immediately removed from the shops, transit and pedestrian traffic of Corso Buenos Aires. Traditional Middle Eastern decoration, patterned rugs and cushioned seating establish a room conceived around long conversations over shisha, tea and cocktails, with music extending the setting into the early hours. Sherazade has paired its hookah program with Moroccan tea and mixed drinks since 2016, maintaining a combination that has remained recognizable through a decade of activity at the same address. The result is a Porta Venezia lounge where shisha, North African tea traditions and an ornamented interior create a late-night counterpoint to the commercial streets surrounding Piazza Lima.
What you should know about Sherazade Shisha.
Sherazade Shisha is best known for sustaining a Middle Eastern shisha lounge on Via Plinio since 2016, when its combination of hookah, cocktails and traditional Arabic decoration was already established near Piazza Lima. Early activity shows a concept built around flavored tobacco and a room furnished with rugs, decorative objects and cushioned seating, placing the act of sharing a hookah inside a setting modeled on the social character of an Arab café. Moroccan tea formed another part of the program from those early years. A blueberry shisha was paired with unfiltered Moroccan tea in late 2016, showing how fruit flavors and North African tea service developed together at the table. By 2017, Sherazade was also preparing combinations such as grape with berries, extending the flavor repertoire without changing the underlying pairing of shisha and drinks. The lounge continued refining that side of the business over subsequent years, and a house special mix had entered the selection by 2020. Another name then became attached to the same Via Plinio address through Sherazade 2, a restaurant and lounge profile sharing Sherazade's location and telephone number. That second presentation broadened the public face of the venue toward bar and food service, yet hookah remained the element connecting the original Sherazade Shisha with its later Sherazade 2 presence. Nearly a decade after its earliest established activity, the same address continues to operate around the combination introduced in its first years: flavored shisha, Moroccan tea, cocktails and a Middle Eastern interior near Corso Buenos Aires.
Blueberry shisha gives Sherazade's flavor repertoire one of its clearest early signatures, bringing a dark fruit profile to the hookah before Moroccan tea introduces warmth and sweetness alongside it. Grape with berries takes the fruit combination in another direction, joining the deeper sweetness of grape with brighter berry notes across a longer smoking session. The house special mix adds a proprietary option to those single-fruit and blended preparations, establishing a choice associated specifically with Sherazade by 2020. Moroccan tea changes the pace at the table through heat, sweetness and mint, with its small-glass service fitting naturally between draws from the hookah. Cocktails open a colder route through the drinks program and have accompanied the shisha selection since the lounge's earliest established years. Small plates of olives and potato chips have also appeared alongside drinks and hookah, adding salt between sweeter fruit flavors and tea. Sherazade Shisha works most convincingly when these elements remain simple and closely connected: fruit-led hookah, hot Moroccan tea, cold cocktails and small savory accompaniments sustaining an evening around the table.
How to fold Sherazade Shisha into your trip.
Sherazade Shisha works as the evening endpoint for an afternoon tracing private twentieth-century collecting, Milanese Liberty architecture and Piero Portaluppi's subterranean experiment in metropolitan public service through Porta Venezia.
Begin at Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano, where Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano assembled more than 2,000 works of twentieth-century art inside the apartment they inhabited in a building designed by Piero Portaluppi between 1929 and 1931. Their collection grew through close relationships with artists whose work they supported early, eventually encompassing Mario Sironi, Giorgio Morandi, Filippo De Pisis and Lucio Fontana. Antonio donated the collection bearing both spouses' names to Milan in 1974 and 1988, and the apartment opened as a museum in 2003 with 300 works arranged across eleven rooms. Continue to Casa Galimberti, commissioned by the Galimberti brothers from Giovanni Battista Bossi and built between 1903 and 1905 on land formerly occupied by the Società Anonima degli Omnibus, which had operated Milan's horse-drawn public transport. Electrification displaced the old depot and released the site for redevelopment, giving Bossi an opportunity to cover the new residence with 170 square meters of polychrome ceramic decoration. Pio Pinzauti and Ferdinando Brambilla executed the kiln-fired ornament and figures, and wrought iron extends the decorative program across the upper balconies. Conclude at Albergo Diurno Venezia, where Portaluppi designed an underground service complex beneath Piazza Oberdan between 1923 and 1926. Public baths occupied the subterranean structure alongside barbers, personal-care services and facilities created for travelers and Milanese residents moving through Porta Venezia. The complex closed in 2006 after decades of decline, then returned to public attention through FAI initiatives beginning in 2014 and a conservation agreement with the Comune di Milano in 2015. The progression moves from Boschi and Di Stefano's private cultivation of modern Italian art through Bossi's transformation of former horse-tram land into Casa Galimberti and into Portaluppi's underground center for metropolitan services, concentrating three distinct chapters of twentieth-century Milan around the streets leading to Sherazade Shisha.
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