Why you should experience Jamaica in Milan, Italy.
Jamaica is a storied Brera café where the district's artistic character meets the Mainini family's century-long stewardship of a gathering place that became inseparable from postwar Italian painting, photography, literature and intellectual life.
Set along Via Brera near Via Fiori Chiari and just steps from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, the café occupies the institutional and creative heart of a district whose studios, galleries and schools repeatedly sent generations of artists through its doors. Worn tiled floors, closely arranged tables, an aged wooden counter, framed photographs and the piano beside the mirror preserve the physical intimacy that allowed conversations to spill freely between painters, photographers, writers and musicians. Little separates one group from another, retaining the social compression that made the room so productive during its celebrated postwar decades. The counter and the small table beside the piano known as the Piccola Svizzera remain natural gathering points inside a café that has resisted the polished reinvention surrounding much of Central Brera. The result is a Brera institution whose surviving interior still carries the scale and informality of the artistic community that made it consequential.
What you should know about Jamaica.
Jamaica is best known for the Mainini family's transformation of a modest 1911 Brera drinking establishment into the artists' café that helped concentrate some of postwar Milan's most consequential creative movements within a single room. Carlo Mainini took over the Fiaschetteria Bottiglieria Ponte di Brera in 1911, and Lina Mainini, later universally known as Mamma Lina, joined the family after their 1928 marriage, becoming famous for extending credit to impecunious artists. Their son Elio Mainini pushed the café decisively toward the cultural world, and musicologist Giulio Confalonieri supplied the Jamaica name, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn and imagined as a tropical counterpoint to gray Milan. Elio accelerated the transformation in 1948 by organizing the Premio Post-Guernica, which drew Gianni Dova, Roberto Crippa, Cesare Peverelli, Bruno Cassinari, Ernesto Treccani and Ennio Morlotti into an exhibition judged in part by Raffaele De Grada. Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni subsequently occupied the same social world despite radically different artistic directions, placing Spatialism and the provocations of the younger Milanese avant-garde around Jamaica's tables. Writers widened the circle through Giuseppe Ungaretti, Salvatore Quasimodo, Nanni Balestrini and Luciano Bianciardi, who worked on La vita agra during the period in which the café became one of his Brera refuges. Ugo Mulas began frequenting Jamaica in 1951 and made the café, its artists and postwar Milan subjects of his earliest photography before his career moved through the Venice Biennale, fashion and the international art world; Mario Dondero, Alfa Castaldi and Uliano Lucas likewise helped turn the Brera milieu into a major chapter of Italian photojournalism. Elio simultaneously experimented with the bar itself, drawing on ideas exchanged with Arrigo Cipriani and Gualtiero Marchesi and establishing an early Italian sommelier school with Marchesi. Milan later honored Mamma Lina for the role Jamaica played in the city's modern artistic culture, and the family line continues through Elio's wife Vittoria, daughter Micaela and granddaughter Carlina, preserving a cultural institution born from more than a century of Mainini stewardship.
Music became another route through which Jamaica's crowded artistic world crossed disciplinary boundaries, especially after the café emerged among Milan's early piano bars at the end of the 1960s. Enzo Jannacci carried that connection onto film in Carlo Lizzani's 1964 adaptation of La vita agra, performing with guitar inside the packed café and linking the physical Jamaica with Bianciardi's literary Milan. Jazz pianist Renato Sellani developed a different relationship with the room, improvising on the piano positioned beneath the mirror and turning an ordinary corner of the café into an impromptu performance setting. Allen Ginsberg later spent afternoons there during the 1970s, extending Jamaica's literary associations from the Italian postwar generation toward the American Beat movement. Photography remained embedded in the café long after Mulas's earliest work, with exhibitions devoted to figures including Alfa Castaldi and Uliano Lucas returning images of Brera's creative community to the place where many of those photographic relationships had begun. Jamaica consequently became more than a backdrop for separate artistic careers: painting, writing, photography, jazz and cinema repeatedly crossed inside the same compact room.
How to fold Jamaica into your trip.
Jamaica works as the café anchor for an afternoon tracing Brera's transformation from religious precinct into an Enlightenment center for science and education before continuing into the experimental theater culture that reshaped the district during the twentieth century.
Begin at Palazzo Brera, whose site passed from the medieval Umiliati to the Jesuits in 1571 before Francesco Maria Richini began shaping the austere seventeenth-century complex around its double-order courtyard. Suppression of the Jesuits transferred the property to the state in 1773, allowing Maria Theresa of Austria to concentrate the Biblioteca Braidense, Accademia di Belle Arti, astronomical observatory and other institutions there; Giuseppe Piermarini subsequently completed the entrance and courtyard, where a bronze cast derived from Antonio Canova's Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker arrived in 1859. Continue into Orto Botanico di Brera, where cultivation by the Umiliati and Jesuits preceded Maria Theresa's 1774-1775 creation of a teaching garden for medicine and pharmacy. Fulgenzio Vitman organized symmetrical beds and two elliptical basins that survive from the eighteenth-century scheme, and the Napoleonic period introduced increasing numbers of exotic and ornamental plants before the garden later returned to an educational mission, preserving a botanical counterpart to the artistic and scientific institutions surrounding it. Conclude at Teatro Studio Melato, descended from Carlo Fossati's theater designed by Fermo Zuccari and inaugurated in 1859 before becoming Italy's first theater to experiment with electric lighting in 1881. Franz Kafka attended there in 1912, later decline carried the building through cinema use and closure, and Giorgio Strehler recovered it for the Piccolo Teatro; Marco Zanuso transformed the interior into a central-plan performance space reopened in 1986 with Strehler's Elvira, o la passione teatrale, and the theater was later dedicated to Mariangela Melato. The progression moves from Richini, Maria Theresa and Piermarini's conversion of Brera into an institutional center through Vitman's Enlightenment-era transformation of monastic cultivation into botanical education into Fossati, Strehler and Zanuso's reinvention of a nineteenth-century theater for modern performance, tracing scholarship, scientific inquiry and theatrical experimentation through the cultural territory that produced Jamaica.
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