Why you should experience Lacerba in Milan, Italy.
Lacerba is a spirited restaurant and cocktail bar where Porta Romana's independent evening culture meets a long-running experiment in Futurist art, Mediterranean cooking and inventive mixology.
Set along Via Orti near Corso di Porta Romana and just steps from the historic streets surrounding Crocetta, the restaurant occupies a tucked-away address whose granite columns, arched ceilings and unusual decorative details establish an immediate separation from the busier avenue nearby. Fortunato Depero provides the principal visual reference, with Futurist-inspired forms extending across a restaurant and adjoining bar conceived as connected yet distinct rooms. Dinner carries naturally into later drinks, allowing seafood and Italian cooking to give way to a bar that becomes more animated as the night advances. That dual character has kept the address relevant across decades of changing Milanese nightlife without erasing the artistic premise that first distinguished it. The result is a Porta Romana restaurant whose artistic character and late-night energy turn dinner and cocktails into two chapters of the same evening.
What you should know about Lacerba.
Lacerba is best known for Angelo and Monica Trapasso transforming an unusual predecessor into a Futurist restaurant before repeatedly reinventing the project across nearly three decades. The siblings founded Lacerba in 1998, taking over premises previously occupied by L'Acerba, a vegan tecoteca run by elderly Germans and known for raw vegan brunches. The cultural direction emerged through Monica, an architect whose university thesis bibliography contained Lacerba, the Florentine avant-garde journal founded by Ardengo Soffici and Giovanni Papini in 1913. The restaurant's own history also connects the naming inspiration with a visit to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Its first incarnation pursued Futurist cooking alongside pizza and attracted attention in the United States, including a New York conference devoted to the concept. The Italian response pushed the Trapassos toward seafood, then another decisive turn arrived in 2004 when the former pizzeria became the separate Quisibeve cocktail bar with Oscar Quagliarini, initially opening only three nights weekly and incorporating improvisational theater. A major renovation followed in 2009. Agostino Galli arrived behind the bar in 2011 as a self-taught bartender and eventually became bar manager, building a program around Bloody Mary, Martini and Old Fashioned variations alongside five new monthly drinks. Another redesign at the end of 2018 rebuilt and soundproofed the bar, followed by a new counter shortly before the 2020 shutdown. Galli now works alongside Sirak Mecconnen behind a bar carrying more than 400 labels, and Daniele Scalzo leads the restaurant kitchen. The Trapassos' original Futurist experiment consequently survived by changing its culinary and drinking forms without abandoning the artistic reference that produced its name.
The drinks reveal Galli's approach most clearly through a deep family of Bloody Mary variations. Maria Lacerba combines house chili vodka with green Tabasco, and Smokey Mary introduces peated whisky with Italian beech-smoked salt. Bloody Marie Galante replaces vodka with agricole rum, falernum and coriander; Bloody Mary Q.B. shifts to tequila, basil and cinnamon liqueur; Yellow Sub-Maria infuses tequila with yellow pepper before turmeric enters the finish. Maria Fumadora takes pineapple cooked in mezcal and passes it through the kitchen oven. Panettone Sour turns Milan's famous cake into a rum infusion joined by Pedro Ximénez and freshly squeezed citrus. Senza Aspettarlo da Te uses Brazilian banana, pineapple, lemon and milk washing, then Late City Night combines rye whiskey with Strega, Galliano and three bitters. Scalzo's kitchen creates its own contrasts through purple-potato gnocchetti with shrimp and saffron cream, cod ravioli with turnip-green cream and crusco pepper, tuna with poppy seeds and veal sauce, and roasted octopus with Pachino tomato, red onion and balsamic vinegar.
How to fold Lacerba into your trip.
Lacerba works as the dinner and cocktail destination after an afternoon tracing Porta Romana's surroundings through Renaissance medicine, sixteenth-century philanthropy and one of Milan's oldest surviving gardens.
Begin at Ca' Granda, where Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti founded the Ospedale Maggiore in 1456 and entrusted Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete, with a hospital organized around cruciform patient wards and symmetrical courtyards. Construction extended for centuries: banker Giovanni Pietro Carcano's seventeenth-century bequest financed a major new campaign under Francesco Maria Richini, including the Cortile d'Onore and the church of the Annunciata, and Giuseppe Macchi's later donation helped bring the enormous complex toward completion in 1805. Continue to Giardino della Guastalla, commissioned by Paola Ludovica Torelli, Countess of Guastalla, as part of the charitable institution she created for young women and completed in 1555. Its later layers include a Baroque fishpond once supplied by the nearby Naviglio, a seventeenth-century aedicule containing Mary Magdalene with angels and a neoclassical temple by Luigi Cagnola; Milan acquired the complex in 1938 and Renzo Gerla and Gaetano Fassi directed its restoration before the garden opened publicly. Conclude at Palazzo Sormani, whose earlier residence passed to Cardinal Cesare Monti and housed his art collection before Francesco Croce designed its Rococo facade and Benedetto Alfieri added the garden front. Milan acquired the palace in 1930, wartime bombing severely damaged it and Arrigo Arrighetti directed its postwar restoration before the building became home to the city's central library in 1956. The progression moves from Sforza and Filarete's Renaissance hospital through Torelli's philanthropic foundation and centuries-old garden into the aristocratic collecting and postwar reconstruction of Palazzo Sormani, carrying the route across medicine, patronage and civic culture before dinner at Lacerba.
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