Why you should experience Dazi Milano in Milan, Italy.
Dazi Milano is a distinctive cocktail bar where Sempione's grand neoclassical character meets a soaring former customs pavilion, contemporary mixology and an event culture spanning music, art and branded creative productions.
Set along Piazza Sempione near Corso Sempione and just steps from Parco Sempione, the bar occupies the western threshold of Central Milan, where the broad ceremonial axis toward the city center opens into one of its largest landscaped public spaces. The Casello di Ponente rises around an interior volume 15 meters high, with original stonework and immense glazed surfaces giving the principal room proportions rarely encountered in a cocktail bar. Minimal furnishings leave those dimensions largely unobstructed, allowing the historic masonry, tall openings and changing daylight across the piazza to dominate the room. An exterior terrace pushes service directly onto Piazza Sempione, creating a second drinking environment with the surrounding nineteenth-century architecture in full view. The result is a Sempione cocktail bar whose immense vertical scale and transparent edges make the building itself inseparable from an aperitivo or late-evening drink.
What you should know about Dazi Milano.
Dazi Milano is best known for returning the Casello di Ponente to sustained public use in November 2021 after a long redevelopment of the twin former customs houses flanking the Arco della Pace. Luigi Cagnola developed the original architectural scheme during the Napoleonic period; construction continued after Napoleon's fall, the decorative program was recast under Austrian rule and the completed complex was inaugurated in 1838, with the customs buildings marking the boundary between Milan and the countryside and collecting duties on goods entering the city. A new chapter began in 2014 when the Agenzia del Demanio awarded Pessina Costruzioni a long-term concession for rehabilitation of the two caselli, leading the company to commission Lombardini22 for a complete conservation and adaptive-reuse project. L22 treated the buildings as complementary cultural spaces, preserving the Ponente structure's closer relationship to its historic configuration and developing its 790 square meters around exhibitions and events connected with Milan and Lombardy. Dazi Milano subsequently converted that architectural program into a mixology bar and cultural venue, and its first years established the building as a platform for unusually varied commissions: Heineken created its Silver Metabar there in April 2022, sculptor Emanuele Giannelli exhibited during June, BMW introduced the new 7 Series in September and Netflix transformed the Levante building into a Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery escape-room experience in December. MARTINI took over the complex from June 22 to July 5, 2023 for the brand's 160th anniversary, building a temporary bar around classic drinks, new signature mixes and musical programming. MEDUZA followed with a takeover for DHL FAST-TRACK in October 2024, extending a pattern in which the restored nineteenth-century structures function simultaneously as drinking destination and stage for international music, design and consumer-culture projects.
Tokyo-Oaxaca pushes the current cocktail program into savory territory through Vida mezcal, Martini Riserva Speciale Ambrato, shiitake mushroom and helichrysum, combining smoke, fortified wine and earthy aromatics in a single drink. Green Eyes turns Grey Goose vodka infused with sage toward St-Germain and green apple, setting herbal depth against floral sweetness and fresh acidity. Sweet Dreams shifts to Bombay Sapphire gin, umeshu, wild berries and ginger before ginger beer adds carbonation and spice. Afternoon Tea builds Dewar's White Label around pineapple, Earl Grey and bergamot, drawing whisky into tannic tea and citrus oils, and Fiero-Pop combines Martini Fiero with a house whisky cordial and citrus-flower powder. Alcohol-free compositions receive the same layered treatment through Floreale, pairing Martini Floreale citrus cordial with ginger ale and bergamot, and Vibrante, where berries, elderflower and cherry soda accompany Martini Vibrante. The drinks move across smoke, herbs, fruit, tea, florals and umami with enough technical range to make the bar program a substantive reason to enter the restored casello.
How to fold Dazi Milano into your trip.
Dazi Milano works as the aperitivo endpoint for an afternoon through Sempione examining three generations of Milanese architecture created for imperial performance, international design and twentieth-century engineering.
Begin at Arena Civica Gianni Brera, commissioned from Luigi Canonica during the Napoleonic transformation of the territory behind the Castello Sforzesco and inaugurated on August 18, 1807. Canonica drew on ancient Roman circus architecture for an immense elliptical venue intended for civic celebrations and spectacles; its early events included naumachiae staged by flooding the central field, and the arena later entered Italian sporting history through football, athletics and decades of use by Internazionale. Continue to Triennale Milano, whose origins reach the 1923 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Monza before the institution transferred to Milan for its fifth edition in 1933. Antonio Bernocchi and his brothers Michele and Andrea gave five million lire toward a permanent home, Giovanni Muzio designed the resulting Palazzo dell'Arte and figures including Gio Ponti and Mario Sironi helped establish the Milan edition as a major meeting point for architecture, industrial design and the visual arts. Conclude at Torre Branca, erected beside the Palazzo dell'Arte for the same 1933 Triennale from a design by Gio Ponti and completed in two and a half months as a slender steel structure approaching 110 meters. Closed in 1972 after becoming unusable, the tower returned through a restoration financed by Fratelli Branca and reopened in 2002, preserving one of the exhibition's most technically audacious surviving structures. The progression moves from Canonica's Napoleonic arena for mass civic performance through Muzio's permanent institution for modern design into Ponti's steel tower for the 1933 Triennale, tracing how Sempione repeatedly became Milan's testing ground for architecture conceived around public display.
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