Why you should experience Le Presine Volanti in Milan, Italy.
Le Presine Volanti is a Mediterranean restaurant where Cinque Giornate's residential streets meet a cross-cultural kitchen shaped by food traditions stretching from Greece and Tunisia through Lebanon to the Horn of Africa.
Set along Via Bezzecca near Via Spartaco and just steps from Piazza Cinque Giornate, the restaurant occupies a compact corner space on the eastern side of Central Milan, where nineteenth-century streets extend outward from the former Porta Tosa toward the quieter blocks beyond the inner ring. Plants, patterned surfaces, closely spaced tables and an informal bar give the room the intimate scale of a personal gathering place, with outdoor seating carrying that atmosphere onto the street during warmer months. The broad geographical reach of the cooking gives lunch or dinner an exploratory rhythm, shifting among eastern Mediterranean, North African and East African traditions without imposing the formality of a conventional regional restaurant. Cocktails extend service into the evening, making the address equally suited to a sequence of shared plates or a longer night around the bar. The result is a Cinque Giornate restaurant whose small physical scale opens onto a strikingly broad geography of Mediterranean and African food culture.
What you should know about Le Presine Volanti.
Le Presine Volanti is best known for extending the cultural project that Orsola “Otta” Capretti and Alem Abay developed through BIKO into an independent restaurant created with Margherita and rooted in decades of creative and social work. Capretti was born in Brescia in 1967 and moved to New York after high school in the late 1980s, where hip-hop and Black music became central interests before dwindling finances brought her back to Italy. She settled in Milan and worked as an illustrator, scenographer, decorator, graphic designer and web designer. Abay came from architecture, shared Capretti's graphic and web practice and spent years representing Milan's young Eritrean community. Their home became a setting for cinema, graphic workshops and applied-arts activities involving Eritrean youth. A vacant ARCI club in Isola then redirected their careers: tired of advertising-agency work, they acquired the former Matatu space on Via De Castillia and created BIKO in 2007. They built the first club themselves despite having no previous bar-management experience, centering its programming on funk, soul and Black music. BIKO later moved to Via Ettore Ponti in Barona, where its kitchen was already serving Eritrean food alongside reggae nights by 2011. Capretti and Abay subsequently joined Margherita to create Le Presine Volanti, carrying the food strand into a separate project on Via Bezzecca. By February 2020, Rolling Stone treated the restaurant as the founders' newly opened venture alongside the established BIKO, completing a progression from art and architecture through community work, music promotion and finally a dedicated kitchen.
The cooking crosses its geography through technique as much as ingredients. Foul begins with stewed fava beans before fresh onion, tomato, chili, yogurt and berberè bring heat, acidity and creaminess to the East African preparation. Tunisian brik encloses tuna, potato, capers, hard-boiled egg and parsley inside crisp filo, with a beef version shifting the filling toward spices, mint and onion. Lebanese kibbeh places minced beef, pine nuts, cumin and onion inside bulgur shells, then pairs them with hummus and vegetables. Cypriot halloumi reaches the grill on skewers with zucchini, peppers and mint. The restaurant's namesake presine use round toasted bread as their base: one layers octopus over boiled potato with caper sauce, egg and herbs; another combines grilled zucchini, goat cheese, mint, Parmigiano and toasted almonds. Zuppa Turka turns red lentils toward lime, and Zuppa Bizantina pairs smaller lentils with orange and turmeric. Dessert stretches the geographical range again through French tarte Tatin, Greek yogurt with honey and walnuts, and a chocolate salami scented with orange.
How to fold Le Presine Volanti into your trip.
Le Presine Volanti works as the meal stop within an afternoon tracing Cinque Giornate through Risorgimento sculpture, Milanese Liberty architecture and the conversion of an early twentieth-century market pavilion into a stage for Dario Fo and Franca Rame.
Begin at Cinque Giornate, where Giuseppe Grandi spent thirteen years developing his memorial to Milan's March 18-22, 1848 uprising against Austrian rule. Grandi kept live animals for observation, including an eagle and an African lion named Bolco, and used Maria Torrani, Giovannina Porro, Luigina Pratti, Innocentina Rossi and Tacita Chiodini as models for five female figures representing successive days of the revolt. He died in 1894 before the finished work's inauguration on March 18, 1895, when the remains of the fallen were transferred into its crypt. Continue to Casa Campanini, which Alfredo Campanini designed for himself between 1904 and 1906 after studying architecture at Brera and winning the competition for the Postal and Telegraph pavilion at Milan's 1906 exposition. Michele Vedani sculpted the female figures flanking the entrance, and Alessandro Mazzucotelli executed Campanini's plant-like wrought iron, joining polychrome glass and sculptural decoration in one of the architect's most personal works. Conclude at Palazzina Liberty, Alberto Migliorini's 1908 pavilion for the Verziere produce market, where merchants used the cafe-restaurant as their meeting point for commercial negotiations. The market departed in 1965, and Luigi Caccia Dominioni subsequently designed the surrounding park inaugurated in 1969. Dario Fo and Franca Rame occupied the abandoned pavilion with La Comune in 1974, turning it into a theater, acting school and gathering place before the building received their names in 2017. The progression moves from Grandi's thirteen-year sculptural response to the 1848 uprising through Campanini, Vedani and Mazzucotelli's collaborative Liberty craftsmanship into Migliorini's mercantile pavilion and its reinvention by Fo and Rame, connecting political revolt, decorative art and experimental theater across Cinque Giornate.
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