Why you should experience Casa Savini Tartufi in Milan, Italy.
Casa Savini Tartufi is an intimate Tuscan restaurant where Brera's historic cultural quarter meets four generations of the Savini family's truffle hunting, Andrea Fogli's elegant dining room and a kitchen centered on fresh seasonal truffles.
Set along Via Cusani near Via Broletto and just steps from the streets leading into Brera, the restaurant occupies a Central Milan corridor connecting the district's galleries, theaters and aristocratic architecture with the western edge of the historic center. Architect Andrea Fogli designed the principal dining room in an Elegant Dining style, creating a composed setting distinct from the smaller aperitivo room near the entrance. Pale surfaces, upholstered seating and controlled lighting establish a restrained backdrop for a product whose aroma becomes most pronounced when shaved immediately before eating. The two-level configuration preserves traces of the address's earlier Tartufotto incarnation, giving lunch and dinner a more intimate scale than the Savini family's broader retail and international operations suggest. The result is a Brera restaurant where architectural restraint concentrates attention on fresh truffles and a Tuscan family tradition developed across more than a century.
What you should know about Casa Savini Tartufi.
Casa Savini Tartufi is best known for translating the Savini family's century-long relationship with Tuscan truffles into a Milan restaurant whose roots extend directly to Zelindo Savini's work at Villa Saletta near Palaia during the 1920s. Zelindo advanced from estate worker to hunting guard and began supplying white truffles to northern Italian buyers before a dispute over the BSA 1000 motorcycle purchased with his earnings prompted him to leave the estate and pursue truffle hunting full time. He acquired a grocery shop and bar in Montanelli, turning its back room into a trading point for local hunters; his son Luciano, then a young pastry cook, joined the business and traveled with Zelindo to negotiate with merchants arriving from Piedmont and Milan. Luciano transformed the family operation again during the 1970s by developing preserved preparations from smaller truffles, expanding a trade dependent on fresh specimens into a range suited to year-round distribution. Cristiano Savini carried that work into restaurant development and international expansion, opening Milan's Tartufotto at this address in 2013 with seven other Tuscan partners, including television chef Simone Rugiati, who developed its original culinary program. Tartufotto presented itself as Milan's first truffle bar and paired Savini truffles with Tuscan producers including Paolo Parisi and Antica Macelleria Falaschi before the address evolved into Casa Savini Tartufi and broadened its cooking beyond the original all-truffle format. The family's most famous find arrived in 2007, when Luciano and Cristiano, accompanied by truffle dog Rocco, uncovered a white truffle weighing 1.497 kilograms; its charity auction produced $330,000 and a Guinness distinction connected with both its size and sale. Cristiano subsequently expanded the Savini operation through dedicated restaurants, Truffle Experience excursions and exports reaching dozens of countries, making the Milan dining room one branch of a family enterprise that still begins with hunters and dogs in the Tuscan woods.
Fresh white truffle reaches the table during its autumn season with an aromatic intensity suited to preparations that leave the tuber raw, allowing thin shavings to warm against the finished dish and release their perfume. Homemade tagliolini provide the clearest example: butter coats the narrow egg pasta before fresh truffle is added, keeping the base deliberately spare beneath the aromatic ingredient. Fried eggs create another traditional pairing, their warm yolks and fat capturing the shaved truffle's aroma across a softer texture. Fassona tartare moves the treatment onto raw beef, placing cool meat beneath fresh seasonal truffle and making temperature part of the contrast. Black truffle also enters a white focaccia with cheese, where baking and melted dairy create a warmer, richer foundation for its deeper earthy character. Tartufamisù carries the ingredient into dessert, folding the Savini specialty into a familiar Italian construction and completing a meal in which raw shaving, gentle heat, fat and temperature repeatedly alter the way truffle reaches the palate.
How to fold Casa Savini Tartufi into your trip.
Casa Savini Tartufi works as the dining endpoint for an afternoon moving through the immediate Brera area via postwar theater, a medieval church repeatedly rebuilt by Milanese architects and an eighteenth-century palace transformed into a major extension of the Brera art complex.
Begin at Teatro Grassi, founded on May 14, 1947 by Giorgio Strehler and Paolo Grassi with Nina Vinchi as Italy's first permanent public repertory theater, inside the former Cinema Broletto in Palazzo Carmagnola. Strehler inaugurated the stage with Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths and appeared himself as Alyosha; the institution subsequently made its “Teatro d'Arte per Tutti” principle the basis of an internationally influential repertory spanning Goldoni, Shakespeare, Chekhov and Brecht. Continue to Santa Maria del Carmine, begun in 1400 under Bernardo da Venezia after Gian Galeazzo Visconti supplied plans for the Carmelite complex and substantially rebuilt after a major structural collapse in 1446. Guiniforte and Pietro Antonio Solari directed later work, aristocratic families filled its chapels with burials and artistic commissions, and Carlo Maciachini finally completed the façade during the nineteenth century, giving the church a construction history extending across almost five centuries. Conclude at Palazzo Citterio, an eighteenth-century residence acquired by the Italian state in 1972 to become the central expansion envisioned by Pinacoteca di Brera director Franco Russoli for his Grande Brera project. Its physical connection with the Brera complex through the garden and botanical garden made the palace central to Russoli's plan, yet successive architectural schemes delayed full realization for decades before the restored building entered the expanded museum complex with twentieth-century collections including works from the Jesi and Vitali holdings. The progression moves from Strehler, Grassi and Vinchi's creation of a postwar public theater through the Solari family's reconstruction of a medieval Carmelite church into Russoli's decades-long expansion of Brera through Palazzo Citterio, concentrating several centuries of Milanese cultural reinvention around Casa Savini Tartufi.
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