Why you should experience Martesana Pastry Shop in Milan, Italy.
Martesana Pastry Shop is a polished Milanese pasticceria where Sarpi's cosmopolitan street culture, Vincenzo Santoro's half-century of pastry craft, championship chocolate work and the ritual of Italian celebration cakes converge inside the second address of one of Milan's most accomplished pastry houses.
Set along Via Paolo Sarpi near Via Bramante and just steps from Chiesa della Santissima Trinità, the pastry shop occupies Sarpi within a pedestrian corridor shaped by Chinese businesses, Milanese storefronts and the dense residential fabric extending north from Parco Sempione. Glass counters place individual pastries, mignon, pralines and larger cakes in close view, turning differences in glazing, piping, chocolate work and fruit decoration into part of the encounter before a selection reaches the table. Morning pastries give the shop a lighter rhythm around coffee before slices, petits fours and elaborate celebration cakes shift attention toward the precise finishing work associated with an Italian pasticceria. The result is a neighborhood branch with the technical ambition of a nationally decorated pastry house, translating Martesana's long Milanese history into a stop equally suited to breakfast, an afternoon sweet or a carefully composed cake.
What you should know about Martesana Pastries.
Martesana Pastry Shop is best known for carrying Vincenzo Santoro's extraordinary development from a fourteen-year-old Puglian arrival in Milan into one of the defining pastry careers of the city to Via Paolo Sarpi, where Martesana opened its second shop in 2015 after almost five decades centered on Via Giovanni Cagliero. Santoro was born in Puglia in 1952 and reached Milan with his family during the economic boom, entering pastry work at fourteen and developing an early fascination with leavened doughs. His education continued far beyond the shop. In 1984 he refined his technique in France at the Ile Saint-Jeaux gastronomy school, adding formal training to the practical craft that had shaped his adolescence. Two years later he created a cake reproducing the Duomo di Milano for a visiting delegation of Spanish pastry chefs during APAL, turning architectural sculpture in sugar into one of the creations most closely connected with his career. His brother Vittorio Santoro extended the family's influence into professional education, becoming a co-founder of Accademia Maestri Pasticcieri Italiani and CAST Alimenti during the 1990s. Another generation emerged directly from Martesana's laboratory through Davide Comaschi, who trained alongside Vincenzo before winning the World Chocolate Masters in Paris in 2013, the first Italian to take the competition's world title. That victory preceded the Sarpi expansion by two years. The new shop arrived during Expo Milano 2015, the same year Martesana first received Gambero Rosso's Tre Torte, beginning a distinction subsequently maintained through successive editions and reaching 91 points in the 2025 guide. Santoro became an AMPI Maestro in 2016. Domenico Di Clemente joined him in 2020 after more than a decade at Four Seasons Hotel Firenze and earlier work connected with Alain Ducasse and Thomas Haas, bringing another internationally experienced pastry chef into Martesana's professional lineage. That same year Santoro's traditional panettone won first place at Artisti del Panettone. Iginio Massari presented Santoro with the Ai Migliori Pasticcieri del Mondo award in 2023, one year before the founder died in Milan at seventy-two. Across Santoro, Vittorio, Comaschi and Di Clemente, Martesana developed as both a pastry house and a workshop through which major Italian pastry careers intersected, giving the Sarpi branch a professional inheritance extending far beyond its 2015 arrival.
The traditional Milanese panettone concentrates that inheritance into a naturally leavened dough enriched with butter and egg yolk before two preparations of candied Italian orange create contrasting textures and preserve the fruit's aromatic oils. Golden raisins, Tahitian vanilla and acacia honey deepen the dough without obscuring the citrus, explaining the balance behind the version that took first place at Artisti del Panettone in 2020. The namesake Martesana cake moves from fermentation toward classic Italian cake craft through light torta Paradiso soaked with maraschino, two layers of pastry cream and a coating of finely crumbled sponge. Tiramisù changes the structure again through coffee-soaked sponge, mascarpone cream, cocoa savoiardi and dark chocolate, concentrating coffee bitterness against the richer dairy filling. Smaller pastries compress those techniques into individual portions, with the rum-soaked mignon babà bringing a glossy, saturated crumb beside pralines whose shells shift attention toward the chocolate tradition strengthened during Comaschi's years in the laboratory. Fruit crostate introduce crisp pastry and fresh acidity, creating a brighter counterpoint to custards, chocolate and enriched doughs. Martesana's pastry case consequently moves from fermentation through soaked sponge, cream, chocolate and fruit with enough technical range to make the sequence of textures as distinctive as any single signature sweet.
How to fold Martesana Pastries into your trip.
Martesana Pastry Shop works as the sweet anchor for an afternoon tracing Napoleonic performance, Milanese tram manufacturing and the institutional rise of Italian industrial design across the districts surrounding Sarpi.
Begin at Arena Civica Gianni Brera, commissioned under Napoleon and designed by Luigi Canonica as an immense elliptical amphitheater inspired by Roman precedents. Its 1807 inauguration included a staged naval battle after water flooded the central arena, and later decades brought cycling, football, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and the finish of the first Giro d'Italia in 1909, when Luigi Ganna won the inaugural race. Continue to Fabbrica del Vapore, where the former Carminati & Toselli works preserve a chapter of Milan's industrial expansion through the production of railway carriages, electric locomotives and trams between the late nineteenth century and 1935. More than one hundred of Milan's enduring 1500-series trams emerged from the complex, connecting its workshops directly with vehicles still moving through the city nearly a century later. Conclude at ADI Design Museum, where the Compasso d'Oro Collection brings the evolution of postwar Italian industrial design into a former industrial complex. ADI itself formed in Milan in 1956 through architects, designers, intellectuals and companies including Ignazio Gardella, Vico Magistretti, Bruno Munari, Marcello Nizzoli, Alberto Rosselli, Albe Steiner and Kartell, developing the institutional home for an award conceived by Gio Ponti in 1954. The collection now joins works such as Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni's Parentesi, Vico Magistretti's Eclisse and Bruno Munari's Zizì with decades of Compasso d'Oro recipients. The progression moves from Canonica's architecture for Napoleonic mass performance through Carminati & Toselli's machinery for an industrializing city into the designers and manufacturers who turned Milanese production into an internationally influential design culture.
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