Why you should experience Il Cannolo Sua Eccellenza in Milan, Italy.
Il Cannolo Sua Eccellenza is a nostalgic Sicilian pastry shop where Moscova's fashionable character meets Anna Lisa's Palermo childhood memories, turning her grandmother's guarded cannolo recipe into thin cinnamon-scented shells filled to order with sheep's-milk ricotta and finished with ingredients drawn from Sicily.
Set along Corso Garibaldi near Via della Moscova and just steps from Santa Maria presso San Satiro Incoronata, the small shop occupies one of the principal pedestrian routes connecting Brera with Porta Garibaldi. Its compact counter keeps the final preparation visible, placing empty shells, ricotta and finishing ingredients within the same immediate field of attention. Cannoli leave the counter only after filling, preserving the contrast between crisp pastry and soft ricotta that determined the founders' original concept. The modest scale gives the shop the directness of a specialist pastry address devoted principally to one Sicilian form. The result is a Moscova pastry shop whose narrow focus turns a family recipe into an unusually concentrated expression of Palermo tradition in Milan.
What you should know about Il Cannolo Sua Eccellenza.
Il Cannolo Sua Eccellenza is best known for Clara and Anna Lisa turning a recipe guarded by Anna Lisa's grandmother into a specialist Sicilian pastry project built around memories of her childhood in Palermo. The two friends arrived at the idea through sharply different professional backgrounds: Clara was Abruzzese and had spent years working in wine, and Anna Lisa was Sicilian with established catering experience. Their decisive artifact was neither a commercial pastry formula nor a chef's reinterpretation. Anna Lisa encountered her grandmother's cannolo recipe inside an old family recipe book, returning her to afternoons spent beside her grandmother in the kitchen and to the specific contrast she remembered between fragile shell and creamy ricotta. Clara and Anna Lisa chose Milan for the project and opened the Corso Garibaldi shop in December 2016, with Anna Lisa taking direct responsibility for production from the handmade shells through preparation of the sheep's-milk ricotta. The Milan success carried the project across the Swiss border in 2019, when two further shops opened in Lugano. Their production network retained the personal relationships behind the original idea: Elena supplies fresh sheep's-milk ricotta from her small dairy in the province of Trapani, Francesca grows organic oranges and lemons in the province of Ragusa, and another Sicilian producer harvests the pistachios selected for the shop. Pastry chef Angelo expanded the work beyond cannoli through cassata, setteveli, mousse and pistachio panettone, giving the founders a broader Sicilian pastry repertoire without displacing Anna Lisa's inherited recipe from the center of the project. The same connection with street pastry led Clara and Anna Lisa to create a contemporary version of the traditional Sicilian cart for events, carrying the fill-to-order method outside the Corso Garibaldi shop. A chance encounter with one grandmother's recipe consequently grew into a Milanese and Lugano pastry project whose founders, producer relationships and specialist pastry work remain tied directly to Sicily.
The cannolo begins with Anna Lisa's family shell recipe, producing a thin pastry with cinnamon and a slight chocolate fragrance before any filling enters it. Fresh sheep's-milk ricotta from Elena's Trapani dairy is worked with only a small quantity of sugar, preserving the cheese's pronounced dairy character and dense creaminess. Filling takes place at service, keeping moisture away from the shell until the final moment and preserving the crisp-soft contrast that Anna Lisa remembered from her grandmother's kitchen. Sicilian pistachio adds a salty nuttiness at the ends, dark chocolate deepens the richer register and candied orange produced from Francesca's Ragusa fruit brings citrus against the ricotta. Cassata carries the same cheese into sponge cake beneath marzipan, sugar glaze and candied fruit, then cassata al forno encloses lightly sweetened ricotta and dark chocolate inside shortcrust pastry for a drier baked treatment. Setteveli moves toward layered pastry through crisp chocolate and cereal, cocoa biscuit, hazelnut Bavarian cream, dark-chocolate mousse and glossy chocolate coating, with another version replacing part of that structure with pistachio. Summer shifts the Sicilian reference toward granita in lemon, coffee, pistachio, white almond and dark chocolate, with brioche col tuppo supplying the traditional companion. Across these forms, the shop keeps returning to the same culinary principle that began with Anna Lisa's grandmother: pastry gains its character through the immediate contrast among shell, dairy, nuts, chocolate and Sicilian citrus.
How to fold Il Cannolo Sua Eccellenza into your trip.
Il Cannolo Sua Eccellenza works as the sweet anchor for an afternoon tracing the northern edge of Central Milan through Sforza religious patronage, nineteenth-century theatrical experimentation and Napoleonic architecture for mass public performance.
Begin at Santa Maria presso San Satiro Incoronata, where the unusual double façade preserves two fifteenth-century churches joined into a single complex in 1484. Francesco Sforza commissioned the first church beginning in 1451, a second adjoining structure followed during the Sforza period, and the resulting paired naves became closely connected with Milan's Augustinian culture; the attached library developed into a significant humanist center, linking ducal patronage with scholarship inside one of Corso Garibaldi's surviving Quattrocento complexes. Continue to Teatro Studio Melato, born as Carlo Fossati's Teatro Fossati in 1859 from a design by Fermo Zuccari and celebrated during the nineteenth century for daytime performances and Edoardo Ferravilla's Milanese theater. It became the first Italian theater to experiment with electric lighting in 1881, received Franz Kafka in 1912, then passed through cinema use and abandonment before Giorgio Strehler recovered it for the Piccolo and Marco Zanuso rebuilt it between 1982 and 1986 as a circular experimental stage. Conclude at Arena Civica Gianni Brera, commissioned during the Napoleonic reconstruction of the territory surrounding Castello Sforzesco and designed by Luigi Canonica as a vast neoclassical amphitheater inspired by Roman precedents. Construction reused stone from demolished Spanish fortifications, and its 1807 inauguration included a naumachia staged before Napoleon; the arena later shifted toward sport, served as Inter's home ground from 1930 to 1947 and received journalist Gianni Brera's name in 2002. The progression moves from Sforza patronage and Augustinian humanism through Fossati, Strehler and Zanuso's successive theatrical experiments into Canonica's Napoleonic arena, tracing religion, performance and public performance across the territory surrounding Corso Garibaldi.
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