Why you should experience GRAMM in Milan, Italy.
GRAMM is an inventive cocktail bar where Navigli's canal-side nightlife meets a 1930s-inflected interior, music-rooted design and a small-room approach to modern mixology.
Set along Ripa di Ticinese near Via Corsico and just steps from the Naviglio Grande, the bar occupies the historic canal bank where towpaths, former artisan premises and narrow courtyards remain embedded in one of Milan's principal evening districts. Forest-green walls, recovered furnishings, mirrors, old photographs and a gramophone establish a compact interior drawing on Victorian decoration and the interwar years. A four-meter wooden counter dominates the room, surrounded by colored hot-air-balloon objects and a collection of prints brought from Carrara by co-owner Niccolò Mazzucchelli. Another room known as Ago e Filo recalls the tailors, shoemakers and other craftspeople who previously worked in these premises, giving the decorative scheme a direct connection to the building's earlier commercial use. The result is a Navigli cocktail bar whose gramophone, inherited prints, reclaimed objects and artisan references turn a narrow canal-side address into a highly personal drinking room.
What you should know about GRAMM.
GRAMM is best known for the professional reinvention of Niccolò Mazzucchelli and Eda Akman, who opened the bar with Niccolò's brother Giacomo in July 2018 and gradually developed themselves into the bartenders directing its drinks program. Mazzucchelli grew up around Massa-Carrara, studied architecture in Florence and moved to Milan for a master's degree before working in interior design with a specialization in restaurants and bars; dissatisfaction with office work eventually pushed him toward hospitality. He began inside his own business washing dishes, assisting in the kitchen and observing more experienced bartenders, with Akman following the same self-directed education in spirits and mixed drinks. Their original ten-cocktail list drew inspiration from major classical composers, connecting the gramophone that supplied the bar's name with drinks dedicated to figures from music history. GRAMM expanded into the adjacent premises in 2021, increasing the physical operation without abandoning its deliberately small drinks lists, which subsequently changed twice each year around subjects ranging from Italian regions and international ingredients to environmental reuse. The GrammGlobe: There Is No Plan(et) B menu pushed that development toward waste reduction by reusing lime, milk, wine and melon water across multiple preparations. A later NBA collection recast the format around nine basketball players including Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Shaquille O'Neal, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Forbes Italia selected GRAMM for its 100 Ristoranti Innovativi 2025 special in the Cocktail Bar category, marking a substantial professional turn for founders who had entered hospitality seven years earlier.
Michael Jordan combines Altamura vodka with Earl Grey, strawberry, green cordial, white chocolate and acids, with strawberry remaining after osmosis dried for the garnish. Charles Barkley moves toward peanut butter, bread and raspberry syrup, turning familiar food flavors into a mixed-drink construction. Bonjour Croissant tackles ingredient reuse from another direction: leftover breakfast brioche undergoes a process that transfers its buttery character into dark rum, balanced by salted vermouth. The GrammGlobe period worked with recovered melon water and repeated applications of citrus, dairy and wine, making waste reduction part of recipe development. Eda Akman and Mazzucchelli later took that approach to Florence Cocktail Week with Dirty Martini using Taggiasca olive brine, Sant'Agata Sour combining gin, lime and extra-virgin olive oil with candied olives, and Peperoni joining pepper bitter with olive oil and dried Taggiasca olives. Seasonal ingredients, culinary infusions, recovered by-products and compact themed lists give the bar's drinks a technical continuity extending well beyond the visual conceit of each new collection.
How to fold GRAMM into your trip.
GRAMM works as the evening endpoint for an exploration along and beyond the Naviglio Grande that follows the canal from working infrastructure through medieval patronage into the reuse of twentieth-century industrial architecture.
Begin at Vicolo dei Lavandai, where the surviving washhouse preserves the physical infrastructure of a trade organized through Milan's Confraternita dei Lavandai from the eighteenth century. Workers knelt on wooden brellin beneath the shelter and scrubbed clothing against stone stalls using water fed from the Naviglio Grande through the fossett; their cleaning compound, palton, mixed ash, soap and soda, and the washhouse remained in use into the twentieth century before domestic washing machines displaced the practice. Continue to San Cristoforo sul Naviglio, a two-part religious complex whose older church was rebuilt in 1192 and joined during the fourteenth century by Pietro Franzoni da Tavernasco's hospice for pilgrims. Gian Galeazzo Visconti sponsored the adjoining fifteenth-century Cappella Ducale following the end of the 1399 plague, connecting the site with Visconti patronage; Ludovico il Moro later came here in 1491 to receive Beatrice d'Este as she arrived from Ferrara. Conclude at Armani/Silos, where Giorgio Armani converted a 1950 granary into a four-level exhibition center spanning 4,500 square meters and opened it on April 30, 2015 for the fortieth anniversary of his career. The former food-storage building now organizes decades of Armani fashion across thematic displays, turning an industrial structure near the canal into a permanent repository for the designer's work from 1980 onward. The progression moves from the Naviglio's direct support of the Lavandai trade through San Cristoforo's role as a medieval canal-side passage shaped by Visconti patronage into Armani's conversion of industrial storage architecture for fashion, tracing successive forms of labor, movement and production across the western Navigli district.
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