Why you should experience A'Riccione Terrazza12 in Milan, Italy.
A'Riccione Terrazza12 is a polished rooftop restaurant where San Babila's fashion-centered cityscape meets Dante and Giuseppe di Paolo's long stewardship of Milanese seafood dining, Marco Fossati's Mediterranean cooking and a two-level perch above the historic center.
Set along Via Durini near Via Borgogna and just steps from Piazza San Babila, the restaurant crowns a Central Milan pocket where postwar architecture, fashion flagships and the dense roofscape around the Duomo converge. The ninth-floor dining room gives way upstairs to a lounge enclosed by expansive glazing, placing the Madonnina and the newer towers of Milan within the same panoramic field. The tenth-floor terrace carries the evening outward beneath a protective overhead structure, with sofas and low tables shifting the setting from formal dining toward aperitivo and late-night drinks. Restaurant and lounge retain distinct rhythms across the two levels, allowing dinner below to transition naturally into cocktails above. The result is a San Babila rooftop whose vertical arrangement turns seafood dining, mixology and the changing city skyline into successive parts of one evening.
What you should know about A'Riccione Terrazza12.
A'Riccione Terrazza12 is best known for extending Dante and Giuseppe di Paolo's stewardship of one of Milan's oldest seafood restaurant names into a rooftop project opened during the pandemic in 2021. The brothers arrived from Abruzzo and entered the original A'Riccione operation as waiters during the 1980s, advancing through the restaurant before taking control around the turn of the millennium; that establishment traced its history to the Romagnolo Metalli brothers and the Vecchia Riccione name of the 1950s. Their next venture, A'Riccione Bistrot, opened in 2008 as an oyster-focused address on Via Procaccini and subsequently developed into a complete seafood restaurant, establishing the expansion pattern that led to San Babila. Terrazza12 occupied spaces with an existing hospitality pedigree: the ninth floor had previously housed Matteo Torretta's Asola, and the tenth-floor Terrazza12 opened in 2015 as a mixology project created by Fabio Acampora and Sebastian Bernardez with Oscar.697 and Diageo. The di Paolo brothers brought the two levels together under the A'Riccione name in 2021 and placed Marco Fossati at the culinary helm as both resident chef and the group's gastronomy director. Born in Milan in 1982 and raised in Liguria, Fossati graduated from the hotel school in Stresa before working with Paola Budel, Filippo Gozzoli, Gualtiero Marchesi, Corrado Corti, Elio Sironi and Antonino Messina, with subsequent experience spanning the Principe di Savoia, Bulgari Milano and Belmond Hotel Splendido in Portofino. A period inside Princi's production laboratory added work beside Gabriele Bonci, Franco Pepe and Renato Bosco, deepening his command of baking before his 2021 return to A'Riccione. The hospitality group expanded again through Da Berti in 2022 and a seasonal Santa Margherita Ligure project in 2024, placing the rooftop within a restaurant lineage that grew from a single historic Milan seafood address into several distinct formats.
Gran Plateau Royal concentrates the raw-seafood side of Fossati's cooking through tartare, scampi, red prawns and a selection exceeding ten oyster varieties, allowing temperature and salinity to carry much of the composition. Oysters have particular weight within the wider A'Riccione repertoire, with selections sourced across Brittany, Normandy, Ireland, Portugal and the Mediterranean and Giuseppe di Paolo personally pursuing producers, including an oyster farm in Sardinia's San Teodoro bay. Jimmy Sakaj, bar manager since 2023 after advancing from barback to head bartender, extends those marine ingredients into the lounge through the Oyster Martini, which incorporates oyster water into the drink. Americanotto combines Campari, Vermouth del Professore Rosso, Braulio Riserva, cardamom and chinotto; Greek Mule moves through vodka, cucumber, Greek yogurt and ginger. Sakaj's team developed a separate Milano Cortina 2026 series with Alfred Betun and Erik Quarantani: Betun's Ice Skating combined mountain gin, white bitter, dry vermouth and Fino Sherry, and Quarantani's Sci Alpino - Cortina '56 joined white vermouth, Select, elderflower liqueur and Trento DOC. Fossati paired that Olympic series with tuna tartare, mountain-pine risotto finished with alpine butter, oyster and veal marrow, and grilled prawns with sweet-sour radicchio, shellfish reduction and herb butter, connecting seafood technique with alpine ingredients through both plate and glass.
How to fold A'Riccione Terrazza12 into your trip.
A'Riccione Terrazza12 works as the evening endpoint for an afternoon through the quieter architectural streets east of San Babila, following Milan from Liberty craftsmanship through eighteenth-century aristocratic architecture into the interwar domestic modernism of its industrial elite.
Begin at Casa Campanini, the residence architect Alfredo Campanini designed for himself in 1904 and completed in 1906 as one of his principal experiments with Milanese Liberty. Michele Vedani sculpted the concrete caryatids flanking the entrance, and Alessandro Mazzucotelli executed Campanini's floral wrought-iron gate; polychrome glass, frescoes and surviving interior decoration carried the architect's control from façade into domestic craftsmanship. Continue to Palazzo Sormani, whose earlier residence entered a major eighteenth-century phase when Francesco Croce created the curved-fronted façade toward Porta Vittoria in 1736 and Benedetto Alfieri later designed the garden front, completed in the 1760s. Leopold Pollack reshaped the grounds as an English garden, and after wartime destruction elsewhere in Milan's library system the palace was converted during the 1950s into the city's central library, joining aristocratic architecture with a new cultural purpose. Conclude at Villa Necchi Campiglio, commissioned by sisters Nedda and Gigina Necchi and Gigina's husband Angelo Campiglio from Piero Portaluppi and completed between 1932 and 1935. The industrial family's residence paired Portaluppi's severe geometric architecture with sophisticated domestic technology before Tomaso Buzzi softened several rooms through later eighteenth-century references; the family eventually donated the property to FAI, which opened the house to the public with major art collections incorporated into its interiors. The progression moves from Campanini's integration of architecture and Liberty craftsmanship through Palazzo Sormani's transformation from aristocratic residence into civic library into Portaluppi's modern house for the Necchi Campiglio industrial family, tracing three different moments when Milanese patrons used architecture to redefine metropolitan life.
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