Why you should experience My Home Café in Milan, Italy.
My Home Café is a convivial espresso bar where Porta Romana's historic commercial spine, neighborhood café culture, participation in the corso's contemporary art initiatives and an intimate all-day format connect a familiar Milanese ritual with the creative life of the surrounding district.
Set along Corso di Porta Romana near Via Orti and just steps from Chiesa di San Pietro dei Pellegrini, the compact café occupies Porta Romana's northern reach, where one of Milan's oldest radial streets narrows toward Crocetta and the historic center. Pale surfaces, timber tables, pendant lighting and shelves of bottles create a bright street-facing room, with a small outdoor section extending the café directly onto the corso. Coffee and pastry remain physically close to the tables through the modest proportions of the interior, giving the address the intimacy of a neighborhood bar even as lunch and later drinks change its tempo across the day. The result is an understated café whose strongest character comes from belonging closely to Corso di Porta Romana and participating in the cultural life that periodically turns the historic shopping street into a distributed exhibition space.
What you should know about My Home Café.
My Home Café is best known for operating as both a neighborhood espresso bar and a participant in the art-led initiatives through which Porta Romana's independent businesses have repeatedly turned the corso itself into a cultural venue. In 2021, the café joined the neighborhood project connected with street artist Cosimo Cheone's The Vision, a vast intervention covering the facade of Casa Maiocchi at Corso di Porta Romana 111. Cheone drew inspiration from Antoni Gaudí's architecture in Barcelona for the work, and its Christmas installation paired the illuminated facade with an initiative distributing signed Cheone postcards and vouchers accepted by My Home Café and other independent addresses along the street. The following year brought a more direct encounter with visual art when My Home Café became one of the exhibition sites for Un, due, tre, Milano!, organized during Photofestival with PortaRomanaBella, Teatro Carcano and Biblioteca Vigentina. Photographers Ermanno Albano, Maurizio Aloi and Claudio Manenti examined Milan through three distinct approaches, and their photographs moved outside conventional galleries into shop windows along Corso di Porta Romana between September 30 and October 31, 2022. My Home Café's participation placed the espresso bar within that distributed exhibition, making its storefront one component of a photographic route extending through the district. Another 2022 neighborhood initiative, PortaMi, transformed participating businesses into exhibition sites for artworks dedicated to Marilyn Monroe, with the public scoring individual works before a final presentation accompanied by photographer Roberto Gandoli, actress and model Francesca Vitaliani and mezzo-soprano Angela Alessandra Notarnicola. My Home Café again joined the participating addresses, connecting the small bar with a recurring effort to use independent commercial interiors and windows as temporary platforms for artists and performers. Those successive collaborations supply the café with a stronger cultural dimension than its modest scale initially suggests, tying daily espresso service to a street where photography, muralism, painting and live performance have repeatedly entered the businesses themselves.
The morning repertoire begins with espresso and cappuccino beside croissants, muffins and cakes, keeping the first hours anchored to the compact combinations characteristic of a Milanese bar. Lunch expands into focaccia, sandwiches and changing first courses, with meat, fish and vegetarian preparations allowing the kitchen to move beyond pastry. Tartare and carpacci introduce colder textures later in the day, accompanied by composed plates designed for a longer table stop. Afternoon service returns toward sweetness through cakes, chocolate and infusions, creating a distinct interval between lunch and drinks. Aperitivo shifts the emphasis again through small savory portions paired with cocktails, beer and wine by the glass. The kitchen describes its approach through fresh ingredients and familiar Italian preparations adjusted with contemporary touches, giving the changing daily selection more importance than a single signature dish. Coffee remains the thread connecting those stages, preserving the fundamental character of the address even as the food moves from breakfast through lunch and into the early evening.
How to fold My Home Café into your trip.
My Home Café works as the meal stop for a Porta Romana route connecting Paola Ludovica Torelli's sixteenth-century charitable foundation, Francesco Sforza and Filarete's Renaissance hospital project and the burial complex created as that institution expanded beyond its original capacity.
Begin at Giardino della Guastalla, commissioned by Paola Ludovica Torelli, Countess of Guastalla, as part of the college she established for young women and completed in 1555 as an Italian garden. A Baroque fishpond later altered the original composition, Luigi Cagnola contributed a Neoclassical temple, and Milan acquired the complex in 1938 before Renzo Gerla and Gaetano Fassi reshaped the grounds for public opening. Continue to Ca' Granda, begun in 1456 after Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti commissioned Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete, to devise an immense hospital organized around cross-shaped wards and internal courtyards. Guiniforte Solari and Giovanni Antonio Amadeo carried construction forward after Filarete departed Milan, and banker Giovanni Pietro Carcano's seventeenth-century bequest financed another major campaign centered on the courtyard associated with Francesco Maria Richini. Conclude at Rotonda della Besana, where Ospedale Maggiore acquired land beyond its older cemetery in 1694 and began the Foppone under Arrisio Arrigoni the following year. San Michele ai Nuovi Sepolcri accompanied the expanding burial ground, and Francesco Croce developed the surrounding arcaded enclosure from 1719, with silk merchant Giambattista Annone helping finance its completion in 1731 after groundwater and inadequate burial capacity forced the project to grow. The progression moves from Torelli's educational foundation and Renaissance garden through Sforza and Filarete's new conception of hospital architecture into the Ospedale Maggiore's expansion of its burial complex, tracing nearly two centuries of charitable institutions reshaping Porta Romana.
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