Why you should experience Levino in Milan, Italy.
Levino is an Abruzzese seafood restaurant where Ticinese's historic southern quarter, the maritime cooking of the Costa dei Trabocchi and three generations of the De Sanctis family converge through recipes carried from San Vito Chietino to Milan.
Set just off Corso San Gottardo near Piazza XXIV Maggio, the restaurant occupies an early twentieth-century building whose renovated interior uses velvet, patterned surfaces and intimate proportions to recall the salons associated with Abruzzo's cultural life. Only a few dozen seats concentrate attention on seafood and the succession of small preparations through which the kitchen presents its Adriatic inheritance. The surrounding district provides a fitting Milanese setting for a family whose cooking originated beside another waterborne landscape, placing the restaurant near the Darsena and the historic canal routes that once moved goods through the southern city. The result is a Ticinese restaurant where a compact Milanese dining room gives the De Sanctis family's century-spanning relationship with seafood a distinctly personal second home.
What you should know about Levino.
Levino is best known for carrying the De Sanctis family's maritime cooking from San Vito Chietino to Milan through a lineage whose restaurant history reaches back to the nineteenth century. The family was already investing in hospitality on the Costa dei Trabocchi by 1891, but Filippo De Sanctis supplied the decisive twentieth-century chapter after beginning professionally as a fish merchant. His knowledge of the daily catch pushed him toward cooking, and in the early 1950s he opened Da Filippo at San Vito Marina with his mother, establishing the restaurant later known as L'Angolino da Filippo. Filippo became particularly associated with brodetto and with a philosophy centered on recently landed fish and the preparations of local fishermen. In 1970 he created Tacconcini alla Filippo for a regional gastronomic competition, turning handmade pieces of water-and-flour pasta, fresh fish and Altino red pepper into a family signature subsequently recognized by the Accademia Italiana della Cucina in 1971. His son Levino learned the entire chain directly from him, following seafood from purchase through preparation and table service during a restaurant career now extending across half a century. Levino's son Andrea entered the family trade young, developed a particular interest in wine and began accompanying his father to the fish market in the early morning to select the day's catch. Milan supplied the turning point. Andrea gained experience at Langosteria, and Levino saw enough ability in his son to commit the family to a restaurant of their own in the city. Levino opened in 2020 with father and son carrying the San Vito inheritance into Via Pietro Custodi, then drew another family practitioner into its culinary direction: self-taught chef Alessandra Piscopo, who leads the kitchen as Andrea works the dining room and wine program. The restaurant later received Gambero Rosso's Premio Foglia, and the Accademia Italiana della Cucina brought its Milano Navigli delegation there in April 2026, pairing Andrea's Cerasuolo selections with Alessandra's cooking. A family story that began with a fish merchant on the Adriatic has consequently arrived in Milan without severing the working practices that started it: Levino and Andrea still select seafood personally, Alessandra cooks the inherited repertoire, and Filippo's Tacconcini remain on the menu more than fifty years after their creation.
The nine-part Viaggio in Costa dei Trabocchi alternates raw and cooked seafood before a seasonal velouté completes the sequence. Tagliatella di seppia nostrana removes pasta from the equation entirely: cuttlefish itself becomes the tagliatella, paired with Altino sweet pepper. Tacconcini alla Filippo take the opposite route toward inheritance, using irregular handmade water-and-flour pasta with a seafood preparation whose red pepper links the dish directly to Abruzzo. Pescatrice alla cacciatora applies a preparation more familiar from meat cooking to monkfish. Elsewhere, black cuttlefish-ink tagliolini carry clams, tiny calamari, scampi, salicornia and tomatoes in a single marine composition. Low-temperature cod arrives over potato and saffron cream. Dessert moves inland through torta bocconotto and cellipieni, Abruzzese pastry traditions that close a seafood meal through the region's sweeter repertoire. The sequence shifts repeatedly between raw flesh, frying, searing, low-temperature cooking and pasta, giving technique its own rhythm without burdening the meal with a succession of heavily compounded constructions.
How to fold Levino into your trip.
Levino works as the meal at the center of a Ticinese route connecting Renaissance banking patronage, Milan's engineered canal system and a neighborhood church shaped by Carlo Borromeo's Counter-Reformation program.
Begin at Sant'Eustorgio, where a Christian complex developed over a Roman cemetery and the Dominicans took possession during the thirteenth century. Its greatest Renaissance intervention came from Pigello Portinari, the Florentine director of the Medici bank in Milan, who commissioned the Portinari Chapel between 1462 and 1468 for his burial and the relic of Saint Peter Martyr. Vincenzo Foppa painted the chapel's fresco cycle, and Giovanni di Balduccio's fourteenth-century marble ark of Saint Peter Martyr was later installed inside it. Continue to Conca di Viarenna, where Milan solved a practical problem in moving Candoglia marble toward the Duomo. Filippo Maria Visconti ordered the Naviglio Vallone in 1438, and Filippino degli Organi and Aristotele Fioravanti created the early lock that negotiated the height difference between the Darsena and the inner canal system; the surviving structure dates from its reconstruction between 1551 and 1558 after construction of the Spanish walls disrupted the earlier installation. Finish at San Gottardo al Corso, already mentioned as a Benedictine oratory in 1398 and rebuilt under Cardinal Carlo Borromeo in 1568 as he reorganized Milanese religious life following the Council of Trent. The church subsequently anchored the commercial settlement outside Ticinese, then received an enlarged nineteenth-century form and Cesare Nava's facade in 1896. The progression moves from Portinari and Foppa's Renaissance chapel through the hydraulic engineering that carried marble toward the Duomo and Borromeo's remaking of an extramural parish before arriving at Levino, where another family brought a regional inheritance into southern Milan.
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