Why you should experience La Belle Alliance in Milan, Italy.
La Belle Alliance is a convivial craft-beer pub where Navigli's after-dark culture meets Ivano Falzone's years in Britain, fascination with Napoleon and conviction that the public house should erase social distinctions around the bar.
Set along Via Evangelista Torricelli near Via Conchetta and just steps from the Naviglio Pavese, the pub occupies a corner of southern Milan where neighborhood streets feed naturally into the canal district without sharing the more theatrical scale of the Darsena. Timber dominates a succession of rooms that includes the main bar and a mezzanine, with blackboards, beer paraphernalia and television screens creating the accumulated appearance of a place that has developed through years of drinking culture. The crowd shifts easily between dedicated beer drinkers, neighborhood regulars and supporters gathering for Serie A, Champions League or Six Nations rugby, giving different evenings noticeably different rhythms without displacing the bar as the center of activity. Tables outside extend that atmosphere onto Torricelli in warmer weather, leaving the pub connected to the residential streets around it even during crowded match nights. The result is a Navigli pub where timber, sport and an unusually serious approach to beer preserve the communal character Falzone first encountered in British public houses.
What you should know about La Belle Alliance.
La Belle Alliance is best known for Ivano Falzone's attempt to transplant the social culture of a British public house into Milan after years spent in the United Kingdom. Falzone's formative experience came in Nottingham, where the company employing him had an internal pub serving Castle Rock Brewery beer and executives mixed at the bar with employees after work. That absence of hierarchy stayed with him and eventually produced La Belle Alliance's guiding principle, “Davanti alla birra siamo tutti uguali.” Another influence arrived through lessons at the Università della Birra, where an encounter with an unpleasant green beer helped convince Falzone that he wanted to work seriously with the drink himself. Returning to Milan, he opened La Belle Alliance in 2002 inside a former McDonald's on Via Torricelli, replacing an industrial fast-food operation with a pub centered on independent brewing. His parallel fascination with Napoleonic history supplied the name. La Belle Alliance was the inn near Waterloo where Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher and the Duke of Wellington met after defeating Napoleon on June 18, 1815, and Blücher subsequently proposed Belle-Alliance as the name of the battle. Falzone carried that history far beyond signage, developing guided tastings in the uniform of a Carabiniere Brasser of the First Light Infantry Regiment of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy and pairing four Brasserie Waterloo beers with episodes from Napoleon's rise and defeat. Beer meanwhile made the pub a recognized address within Milan's craft scene, with Falzone later adding the Tap project to his work as a publican. More than twenty years after opening, La Belle Alliance still joins the two passions that shaped it at the beginning: British pub culture and beer on one side, Napoleonic history on the other.
Fifteen rotating taps form the working center of the beer program, spanning high, low, spontaneous and mixed fermentation and supported by more than forty bottled selections. British tradition receives particularly close attention through house beers commissioned from producers including Birrificio Oltrepò, with Jena taking the form of an amber bitter marked by herbal and honey notes and Trafalgar moving into stout through coffee and dark chocolate. Service changes with the beer itself: hand pump and cellar temperature suit the British ales, and Belgian, German and gravity-pour methods allow other styles to arrive with their intended carbonation and foam. Italian breweries occupy much of the remaining rotation through relationships Falzone and his team have cultivated directly with producers over years of visits and shared tastings. Zolesterolo supplies the pub's signature food pairing through fried cubes of gorgonzola and chips, bringing molten cheese and a crisp coating against malt or hop bitterness. Hot Belle Chicken Wings use smoked paprika, pepper and muscovado sugar, and Porkoarrosticino seasons pork with coriander, chile, garlic and oyster sauce before grilling it on skewers. The Big General hamburger carries the same substantial pub-food approach into a full meal, allowing the kitchen to support extended beer tasting without competing with the taps that remain La Belle Alliance's principal reason for existence.
How to fold La Belle Alliance into your trip.
La Belle Alliance works as the evening destination for a Navigli route connecting a medieval suburban parish reshaped during Carlo Borromeo's Counter-Reformation, a former neighborhood cinema converted into a major symphonic hall and the hydraulic infrastructure that carried Milan's canal ambitions south toward Pavia.
Begin at Chiesa di San Gottardo al Corso, already attested as a Benedictine oratory in 1398 before Carlo Borromeo rebuilt it and established the parish in 1568 as part of his reorganization of the Milanese diocese. Its territory once extended through the commercial settlement outside Ticinese into Conca Fallata, Cascina Chiesa Rossa and Morivione; later interventions included the 1740 reconstruction, nineteenth-century enlargement and Cesare Nava's 1896 façade. Continue to Auditorium di Milano, whose building began life around 1920 as the 2,000-seat Cineteatro La Montagnetta at the corner of Via Torricelli and Via Conchetta. It became Cinema San Gottardo in 1932, was reconstructed by Alessandro Rimini as Cinema Massimo in the late 1930s, survived wartime bombing and later hosted television production before Agostino Liuni commissioned Studio Marzorati to convert it into a concert hall. Riccardo Chailly inaugurated the Auditorium on October 6, 1999 by conducting Mahler's Second Symphony. Conclude at Conca Fallata, where an abandoned seventeenth-century attempt to extend navigation toward Pavia left a lock whose derisive Milanese name outlived the failed project. Napoleon ordered work on the Naviglio Pavese restarted in 1805 under mathematician-hydraulic engineer Vincenzo Brunacci and engineers Giussani and Giudici, and continuous navigation between Milan and Pavia was achieved in 1819. The lock later acquired an industrial function when the Cartiere Ambrogio Binda exploited its water drop for power from the nineteenth century. The progression moves from Borromeo's organization of the extramural parish through Rimini, Liuni, Marzorati and Chailly's successive reinventions of a neighborhood entertainment hall into Brunacci, Giussani and Giudici's completion of the Naviglio Pavese, tracing religious administration, performance culture and hydraulic engineering through southern Navigli.
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