Why you should experience Il Mannarino Navigli in Milan, Italy.
Il Mannarino Navigli is a convivial macelleria con cucina where Navigli's canal-side character meets Gianmarco Venuto's childhood memories of Puglian butcher shops, bringing the Valle d'Itria tradition of choosing meat at the counter and eating it from the grill into one of Milan's busiest dining districts.
Set along Alzaia Naviglio Grande near Piazza XXIV Maggio and just steps from the Darsena, the restaurant occupies a prominent position at the canal's eastern entrance. Ceramic plates, abundant plants and the olive tree in the principal dining room carry southern Italian references into a setting developed specifically for the Navigli location. The butcher counter controls the movement of the meal, placing the selection of cuts before cooking and allowing the macellaio to remain directly involved in what reaches the grill. A live-music program called La Cena Suonata later added guitar, tambourines and young performers to selected evenings at this address. The result is a Navigli restaurant that translates the Puglian macelleria con fornello into a Milanese canal-side setting without separating butcher, grill and dining room.
What you should know about Il Mannarino Navigli.
Il Mannarino Navigli is best known for carrying Gianmarco Venuto and Filippo Sironi's reinterpretation of the Puglian macelleria con fornello to the Naviglio Grande after a friendship and entrepreneurial partnership that began when they met as classmates during their first year of secondary school. Both were born in 1989, but their professional paths diverged: Sironi studied economics at Università Bocconi and the London School of Economics before developing expertise in retail and founding a business-consulting company, and Venuto studied architecture and design at Politecnico di Milano before working across digital arts, web design and communications. Venuto's Puglian roots supplied the formative idea. Summer holidays exposed him to butcher shops where customers selected meat and stayed to eat it, and returning north left him with a childhood nostalgia for those communal macellerie con cucina. The two friends converted that memory into Il Mannarino in 2019, opening their first Milan shop in Piazza De Angeli with a format that restored the butcher counter as the central relationship between customer, meat and grill. Their timing immediately became consequential when the pandemic disrupted restaurant service, pushing the young company toward home delivery and online meat sales during its earliest growth period. By 2021 the business had reached €7 million in revenue, and the founders were preparing an expansion that brought their fourth Milanese bottega to Alzaia Naviglio Grande in 2022. This location soon acquired its own cultural strand through La Cena Suonata, launched that December with singer Matteo Ghione and continued through performances built around guitar, tambourines and Italian and international songwriting. Expansion accelerated beyond Milan: the group reached sixteen butcher-restaurants by mid-2024 and its twenty-third location in Verona in March 2026. Sironi and Venuto then created PG Food Brands in 2026, bringing Il Mannarino together with their later Veramente and Rosita projects under a single hospitality group. A childhood memory of Puglian butcher shops had developed, within seven years, into the foundation of a multi-brand restaurant company.
The butcher counter establishes the central rhythm of the meal, beginning with a conversation over the available meat before the chosen cut moves toward the grill. Bombette provide the clearest connection with the Valle d'Itria, wrapping thin slices of Italian pork capocollo around canestrato cheese before the small rolls are cooked until the exterior browns and the filling softens inside. The same hand-rolled form then branches into stronger combinations: Bronte uses beef, pistachio and gorgonzola, Salamina adds salami and caciocavallo beneath red breadcrumbs, and Mortazza joins capocollo with mortadella, sweet provola and a black charcoal coating. Zampina shifts the experience from filled rolls to a Puglian sausage built predominantly from beef, seasoned with tomato, basil, salt and pepper before meeting the grill. Costata and Fiorentina bring the counter itself back into focus, since thickness and cut determine a slower encounter with fire and a more direct expression of the selected beef. Polpette al sugo, fave e cicoria and capocollo di Martina Franca then extend the meal from grilled meat into the domestic cooking and cured products associated with southern Italy. The counter-to-grill sequence gives these dishes their coherence, keeping the macellaio's act of selecting and cutting meat at the center of an experience that begins before the diner reaches the table.
How to fold Il Mannarino Navigli into your trip.
Il Mannarino Navigli works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing Milan's southern gateway from Spanish hydraulic infrastructure through twentieth-century preservation of Ambrosian art into one of the city's oldest Christian complexes.
Begin at Darsena, constructed in 1603 under Spanish governor Pedro Enríquez de Acevedo, Count of Fuentes, beside the new defensive walls and the water connection leading toward the Viarenna lock. The basin became Milan's port and a crucial junction between the Naviglio Grande and internal waterways; excavations begun for an underground garage in 2004 unexpectedly exposed foundations of the Spanish walls and a wooden platform associated with the earlier Viarenna system, reconnecting the modern waterfront with the engineering beneath it. Continue to Museo Diocesano Carlo Maria Martini, whose origins reach to Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster's 1931 proposal for a diocesan museum before Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini selected the Sant'Eustorgio cloisters for the institution in 1960. Carlo Maria Martini initiated reconstruction of the war-damaged cloisters with Studio Belgiojoso during the 1980s, Antonio Piva developed the museum installation from 1996 and Monsignor Luigi Crivelli with director Paolo Biscottini brought the project to completion in 2001; its collection now approaches one thousand works spanning the early Christian centuries through contemporary art. Conclude at Sant'Eustorgio, built over a Roman cemetery where Bishop Eustorgius was buried during the fourth century and later associated with the relics of the Magi, seized by Frederick Barbarossa after the 1162 sack of Milan before a portion returned from Cologne in 1903. Dominican friars made the complex a major center from the thirteenth century, and subsequent patronage produced Pigello Portinari's chapel, Vincenzo Foppa's 1460s fresco cycle and Giovanni di Balduccio's 1339 marble Ark of Saint Peter Martyr, binding centuries of religious history to major works of Lombard art. The progression moves from the Count of Fuentes's seventeenth-century port through Schuster, Montini and Martini's long campaign to preserve Ambrosian art into Sant'Eustorgio's transformation from early Christian burial ground to Dominican center and Renaissance artistic complex, revealing how water, collecting and religious patronage shaped the southern entrance to Milan.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
