Why you should experience Martesana Pastry Shop in Milan, Italy.
Martesana Pastry Shop is a storied Milanese pasticceria where Sarpi's cross-cultural street life, Vincenzo Santoro's half-century of pastry craftsmanship, classical Italian celebration cakes and award-winning chocolate and lievitati converge inside the second shop of an institution born beside the Naviglio Martesana in 1966.
Set along Via Paolo Sarpi near Via Messina and just steps from the western stretch of Milan's Chinatown, the pastry shop occupies Sarpi where pedestrian movement and an unusually concentrated food culture place a traditional Milanese pasticceria amid Chinese bakeries, restaurants and specialist grocers. Glass counters turn the visit into a development across mignon, glazed entremets, pralines, breakfast pastries and larger celebration cakes, giving differences in scale, finish and technique immediate visual presence before anything reaches the table. Coffee and pastry provide the simplest entry into the selection, then layered cakes, chocolate work and seasonal lievitati reveal the deeper technical tradition carried from the original Cagliero laboratory into this branch. The result is a Milanese pastry experience shaped by one house's long creative lineage and encountered within a district whose contemporary food culture extends far beyond any single tradition.
What you should know about Martesana Pastry Shop.
Martesana Pastry Shop is best known for carrying Vincenzo Santoro's pastry legacy into Via Paolo Sarpi through the first major expansion of a Milanese institution that became a training ground for several accomplished Italian pastry chefs. Born in Puglia in 1952, Santoro moved to Milan as a teenager during the economic boom and entered pastry work at fourteen, developing a particular fascination with fermentation and lievitati. The first Martesana opened in 1966 on Via Giovanni Cagliero beside the waterway that supplied its name, beginning as a neighborhood pastry shop before Santoro pursued increasingly ambitious technical training. France became part of that development in 1984, when he refined his craft at the Ile Saint Jeaux gastronomy school. Two years later he created a cake modeled on the Duomo di Milano for a visiting delegation of Spanish pastry chefs during APAL, turning one of his early showpieces into an enduring work associated with the house. Santoro's brother Vittorio developed a parallel educational legacy, helping establish both AMPI, the Accademia Maestri Pasticcieri Italiani, and CAST Alimenti, connecting the family enterprise with professional pastry education beyond its own laboratories. Davide Comaschi emerged directly from that environment. He trained beside Santoro at Martesana before winning the World Chocolate Masters in Paris in 2013, carrying the shop's chocolate work onto an international competitive stage. The Sarpi shop followed in 2015 as Martesana's second location, opening during the same year the house participated in Expo Milano's Chocolate and Cocoa Cluster. Santoro received the title of Maestro and entered AMPI in 2016. Alessandro Comaschi subsequently assumed leadership of the laboratory and won SIGEP prizes in 2018 for best chocolate entremet and best technical recipe, the same period in which Marcella Moutte received the World Pastry Stars award for best pastry chef under thirty. Martesana also won Gambero Rosso's award for Italy's best savory pastry in 2018, built around twelve savory mignon conceived with the visual precision of their sweet counterparts. Paco Torreblanca joined the house in 2019 for the first Be My Guest collaboration, bringing his Chocolate al Horno into an international exchange between resident and visiting pastry masters. Santoro reached another career summit in 2020 when his traditional Milanese panettone won Artisti del Panettone, and Iginio Massari presented him with the Ai Migliori Pasticcieri del Mondo honor at Host Milano in 2023. After Santoro's death in 2024, executive pastry chef Domenico Di Clemente became a principal custodian of the technical culture his mentor had spent decades building, with Martesana holding Gambero Rosso's Tre Torte again in 2025.
The traditional Milanese panettone provides the clearest edible expression of Santoro's work with natural leavening, developing its soft crumb around butter, egg yolk and lievito madre before two treatments of Italian candied orange introduce different aromatic intensities. Golden raisins and Tahitian vanilla deepen that profile without obscuring the citrus, giving the loaf the combination that carried Santoro to first place at Artisti del Panettone in 2020. Chocolate opens another route through the house's technique, moving from pralines toward layered entremets where contrasting textures become increasingly pronounced. The namesake Martesana cake places sponge and custard against fresh cream, dark chocolate, vanilla and lemon, using restrained acidity to cut through its richer dairy components. Alexander shifts the balance toward pistachio, raspberry and Dulcey chocolate, then adds almond flour, roasted cocoa beans and darker chocolate for greater contrast between fruit, nuts and cacao. Seasonal pastry broadens the sequence through croissants, veneziane and colombe, preserving fermentation as a recurring technique beyond the Christmas loaf. Mignon compress the same attention to layering and finish into smaller forms, allowing several combinations to be tasted across a single visit without losing the precision associated with full-size cakes. The progression from naturally leavened dough through chocolate, fruit, cream and miniature pastry keeps Santoro's original technical interests visible across forms that successive Martesana pastry chefs have continued to develop.
How to fold Martesana Pastry Shop into your trip.
Martesana Pastry Shop works as a pastry stop within a Sarpi outing connecting Milan's industrial tram-building history, the institutional rise of Italian product design and Carlo Maciachini's vast nineteenth-century project for civic remembrance.
Begin at Fabbrica del Vapore, where Antonio Carminati, Giuseppe Pozzi and Carlo Toselli founded Carminati, Toselli & C. in 1899 to build and repair railway and tram rolling stock. Expansion produced the Società Italiana Carminati Toselli in 1907, and the workforce reached 1,350 by 1919 before engineers D'Alòi and Cuccoli developed Milan's 1928 tram from the American Peter Witt model; more than five hundred examples were built, with descendants of the series still crossing Milan. Continue to ADI Design Museum, whose permanent collection grows from the Compasso d'Oro created in 1954 through Gio Ponti and La Rinascente and administered by ADI from 1958. The collection brings together works by figures including Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Ettore Sottsass, Franco Albini, Enzo Mari, Bruno Munari and Richard Sapper, placing decades of Italian industrial design inside former tram and electrical buildings near Via Ceresio. Conclude at Cimitero Monumentale, where Carlo Maciachini won the competition for Milan's great unified cemetery and received final approval for his design in 1863. The complex opened for burials in 1866, its Central Ossario followed in 1873, and the Famedio reached completion in 1887 after its original chapel purpose had shifted toward commemorating distinguished Milanese figures; Alessandro Manzoni's granite sarcophagus, also designed by Maciachini, occupies its center. The progression moves from Carminati Toselli's engineering of Milanese tram culture through the Compasso d'Oro's codification of Italian industrial design into Maciachini's architectural union of art and collective remembrance, tracing three forms of Milanese authorship around Sarpi.
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