Why you should experience Il Marchese Milano in Milan, Italy.
Il Marchese Milano is a theatrical Roman osteria where Brera's cultivated character meets Davide Solari and Lorenzo Renzi's fusion of aristocratic grandeur, popular Roman cooking and Italy's amaro tradition, translating Alberto Sordi's Marchese del Grillo into a restaurant shaped equally by cuisine, cocktails and period-inspired design.
Set along Via dei Bossi near Via Broletto and just steps from Palazzo Clerici, the restaurant occupies a former bank whose neoclassical architecture gave Solari and Renzi an unusually elaborate Milanese stage. Luca Gasparini of Gasparini e Architetti and Delfina Caprio of D-factory preserved historic columns and mosaic flooring, then developed the rooms through velvet, glass, brass, crystal chandeliers and rougher timber details drawn from the contrast between noble salon and Roman osteria. An oval central court gathers the open kitchen, cocktail bar and live-music stage around its columns, giving dining, drinking and performance a shared focal point. A separate private room contains its own kitchen and bar with a dedicated chef and bartender, extending the dual culinary-mixology premise into a smaller format. The result is a Brera restaurant whose architecture makes the collision between Roman nobility and tavern culture physically legible before either Roppo's cooking or Valeriani's amari reach the table.
What you should know about Il Marchese Milano.
Il Marchese Milano is best known for carrying Davide Solari and Lorenzo Renzi's decades-long partnership from Roman nightlife into a Milanese restaurant built around Daniele Roppo's cooking, Fabrizio Valeriani's amaro program and the cinematic world of Alberto Sordi. Solari and Renzi have been friends since school and began creating hospitality projects together with Art Cafè in 2001, followed by Ondanomala at Fregene in 2003 and V Lounge in Ostia in 2009. Their later Il Marchese concept took its name from Mario Monicelli's 1981 film Il Marchese del Grillo, using Sordi's aristocrat and the film's carbonaro as opposing social characters behind a single restaurant idea. Daniele Roppo arrived through an equally personal route. He grew up between a Roman grandmother and Puglian grandfather, studied economics and played rugby before abandoning that path for professional cooking, first teaching himself through books by Joël Robuchon and other French and Italian chefs and then attending Rome's A Tavola con lo Chef. Work with Arcangelo Dandini at Caffè Propaganda deepened his Roman foundations, and he subsequently joined Marco Martini at Stazione di Posta before participating in the early development of InOfficina. Roppo's connection with Sordi preceded the restaurant by decades: as a seven-year-old, he encountered the actor at their shared barber, where Sordi joked with him before leaving for Cinecittà. Solari and Renzi brought Il Marchese to Milan in 2022 with Roppo directing the kitchen and Fabrizio Valeriani overseeing drinks, extending a concept whose bar had established itself as Europe's first dedicated amaro bar and assembled more than 600 Italian labels. Valeriani built the cocktail side around Italian bitters, house preparations and multiple interpretations of the Americano, creating a liquid counterpart to Roppo's contemporary Roman cooking. The Milan restaurant entered the MICHELIN Guide for 2025, and actor Luca Argentero subsequently became a partner in the wider restaurant group, joining Roppo in developing the Roma Milano risotto that explicitly connects the two cities behind the project.
Roma Milano makes that geographical connection edible by placing Milanese saffron risotto beneath the deep braised character of Roman coda alla vaccinara, allowing northern rice technique and Roman offal tradition to occupy the same plate. Carbonara then returns the cooking firmly toward Rome through pasta, egg, pecorino and guanciale, with Roppo's lighter contemporary handling preserving the dish's recognizable structure. Amatriciana carries guanciale and tomato into a sharper register, opening a direct route toward Valeriani's bitter-led drinks. His Americano variations change the amaro inside the familiar vermouth-and-bitter family, and the menu grades those drinks by sweetness and bitterness so the pairing shifts with the food. Cavaliere di Franciacorta takes another direction through sparkling wine, tequila and Amaro del Capo Red, a combination developed beside croquettes of bollito and baccalà. The current cocktail collection extends the two-city premise by naming drinks after metro stops in Rome and Milan, turning the connection established by the food into the organizing device behind the bar. Il Marchese consequently moves through Roman cooking and Italian bitter spirits as one continuous experience, with the Milano address adding saffron rice and local references without severing the culinary foundation Solari, Renzi, Roppo and Valeriani carried north.
How to fold Il Marchese Milano into your trip.
Il Marchese Milano works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing Milanese power and collecting from eighteenth-century aristocratic patronage through a Renaissance sculptor's extraordinary private house into the nineteenth-century transformation of a noble residence into a public museum.
Begin at Palazzo Clerici, where Marquis Anton Giorgio Clerici transformed an older Visconti property into one of eighteenth-century Milan's richest residences and commissioned Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to paint the vault of the Galleria degli Arazzi in 1741. The palace later housed Archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg-Lorraine and Maria Beatrice d'Este between 1771 and 1778, carrying a private patrician residence into the political world of Austrian Milan before Palazzo Reale assumed the couple's court functions. Continue to Casa degli Omenoni, acquired by imperial sculptor Leone Leoni in 1549 and extensively rebuilt from 1565 as both his residence and a setting for the collection he assembled with his son Pompeo. Antonio Abondio sculpted the eight colossal stone figures that gave the house its name, and the Leoni collection encompassed antiquities, works associated with Titian and Correggio and Leonardo da Vinci drawings inherited through Francesco Melzi, including sheets later incorporated into the Codex Atlanticus. Conclude at Museo Poldi Pezzoli, where Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli turned inherited wealth, political exile and European travel into one of Milan's defining private collections. After supporting the 1848 uprising, he encountered international collecting culture in Switzerland, France and England, then commissioned Giuseppe Balzaretto, Giuseppe Bertini, Luigi Scrosati and Filippo Peroni to transform his residence around paintings, arms and decorative arts; his bequest opened the house to the public in 1881, and Fernanda Wittgens and Ferdinando Reggiori directed its reconstruction after the devastating 1943 bombing. The progression moves from Anton Giorgio Clerici and Tiepolo's aristocratic patronage through Leone and Pompeo Leoni's Renaissance fusion of artistic production and collecting into Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli's conversion of private connoisseurship into a permanent public institution, tracing three centuries of Milanese wealth transformed through architecture and art.
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