Why you should experience Leonardo in Milan, Italy.
Leonardo is a neighborhood pastry shop where Magenta's residential elegance, Milanese cafe ritual, house-made pastry and Suresh Shaffi's extraordinary ascent from employee to proprietor converge inside a longstanding Via Saffi address.
Set along Via Aurelio Saffi near Via Vincenzo Monti and just steps from Santa Maria delle Grazie, the pastry shop occupies a polished residential pocket shaped by nineteenth-century apartment buildings, garden villas and the cultural institutions surrounding Corso Magenta. Classic wood furnishings and a brightly illuminated counter preserve the atmosphere of a traditional Milanese caffetteria, with pastries occupying the foreground from breakfast onward. Fruit tartlets, filled brioches and small cakes accompany espresso and cappuccino through the morning before the room broadens into lunch and aperitivo service later in the day. The result is a neighborhood institution whose familiar cafe rhythms conceal an unusually compelling story of migration, apprenticeship and eventual ownership.
What you should know about Leonardo.
Leonardo is best known for Suresh Shaffi's progression from a newly arrived Sri Lankan immigrant to the owner of the Milanese pastry shop where he spent much of his working life. Born in Sri Lanka in 1974, Shaffi spent the first half of his life there before earning a Business degree in London and moving to Milan in 2001. His first Italian job was as a kitchen assistant. An unexpected detour followed when he worked as a driver for architect Vico Magistretti, among the central figures of postwar Italian design. Shaffi subsequently joined Leonardo and remained there for fifteen years, working first as a waiter and barista and learning the operation from inside. Another significant figure already stood behind the counter's history. Milanese fashion entrepreneur Pupi Solari, who had opened her celebrated children's boutique in 1969, purchased Leonardo in 2003 and became an early example of a fashion figure acquiring a historic Milanese pastry shop, years before Prada acquired Marchesi. Shaffi stayed through that period. When the previous owner decided to sell, the longtime employee stepped forward to purchase the business himself, later crediting his family with making that ambition possible. Ownership placed him at the head of the same room in which he had spent well over a decade serving customers. His eldest daughter, Fathima Sarah, subsequently joined him at Leonardo, extending the operation into a family enterprise. Shaffi's own culinary profile continued developing after the acquisition. In May 2025 he appeared in Paolo Marchi's Capolavori del mondo in cucina segment for Striscia la notizia, presenting his version of budino di riso, the Tuscan pastry built from a shortcrust shell around rice and pastry cream. The appearance connected a man who arrived in Milan as a kitchen assistant with Marchi, founder of Identità Golose, through a pastry interpretation presented on national television. Leonardo's ownership history consequently carries several distinct Milanese worlds through the same address: Solari brought fashion entrepreneurship into the caffetteria, Magistretti briefly intersects with Shaffi's early years in the city, and Shaffi's fifteen-year apprenticeship culminates in ownership and a second generation working beside him.
Leonardo's fruit tartlets begin with house-made pastry and move through pastry cream and fresh fruit, establishing the combination most closely associated with its sweet counter. Brioches shift toward softer laminated dough and fillings of jam, cream, dark chocolate or milk chocolate. Cakes and filled biscuits broaden the same pastry work into larger and smaller formats. Kipferl add another breakfast form to the counter. Carnival brings baked chiacchiere dusted with powdered sugar or left plain, joined by tortelli during the same seasonal cycle. Budino di riso introduces shortcrust pastry around rice and pastry cream through Shaffi's own interpretation of the Tuscan sweet. Gelato moves production into a colder register and is made daily in the laboratory without emulsifiers, preservatives, colorings, vegetable fats or industrial flavorings. Milk, eggs, chocolate, seasonal fruit and hazelnuts form its principal ingredient base, with fruit changing alongside the season. Crepes and waffles then provide warm surfaces for cream, chocolate, whipped cream and gelato, giving the pastry shop a sequence that moves from laminated dough and shortcrust through baked Carnival sweets to frozen production.
How to fold Leonardo into your trip.
Leonardo works as the pastry stop in a compact Magenta route connecting Sforza patronage, Milanese Baroque architecture and the institutional rise of Italian design.
Begin at Santa Maria delle Grazie, where Gaspare Vimercati gave land to the Dominicans in 1460 and Guiniforte Solari directed construction from 1463 before Ludovico il Moro recast the complex as a Sforza dynastic project. Donato Bramante reshaped the church's eastern end, and Ludovico commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint Christ and the apostles in the convent refectory during the artist's Milanese period. Continue to Palazzo Litta, commissioned by Bartolomeo Arese and built by Francesco Maria Richini between 1642 and 1648. Carlo Giuseppe Merlo later created its ceremonial staircase, Giovanni Antonio Cucchi worked on the Rococo decoration, and Bartolomeo Bolli produced the exuberant Corso Magenta facade between 1752 and 1761, turning a seventeenth-century aristocratic residence into one of the district's major architectural compositions. Finish at Triennale Milano, whose institutional history began with the 1923 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Monza before the exhibition moved to Milan in 1933. Giovanni Muzio designed its 12,000-square-meter Palazzo dell'Arte after Antonio Bernocchi and his brothers Michele and Andrea gave the city five million lire for a permanent home; Gio Ponti and Mario Sironi were among the figures guiding the institution during its formative Milanese period. The progression moves from Sforza patronage and the meeting of Bramante and Leonardo through Richini, Merlo and Bolli's successive interventions at Palazzo Litta into Muzio, Ponti, Sironi and the Bernocchi family's twentieth-century design institution before returning to Leonardo for another Magenta story built across generations.
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