Why you should experience Pasticceria Martesana in Milan, Italy.
Pasticceria Martesana is a masterful pastry shop where Maggiolina's quiet residential character, Vincenzo Santoro's ascent from a Puglian bakery apprentice to one of Milan's great pastry masters, world-championship chocolate work and an enduring devotion to naturally leavened panettone converge at the original home of a business spanning six decades.
Set along Via Giovanni Cagliero near Via Melchiorre Gioia and just steps from Chiesa di Sant'Angela Merici, the pastry shop occupies a secluded Maggiolina pocket where postwar apartment buildings, tree-lined residential streets and the nearby Villaggio dei Giornalisti soften the transition between the dense city around Centrale and the surviving course of the Naviglio Martesana. The broad storefront opens through large windows onto an interior organized around long pastry displays, café tables and an immense selection of mignon, cakes, chocolate and leavened baking, giving the original neighborhood shop the visual abundance of a much larger destination pasticceria. Morning brioche and coffee establish the first rhythm before trays of miniature pastries, chocolates and composed cakes draw attention toward the precision of the laboratory, with seasonal displays changing the emphasis again around Easter and Christmas. The result is a Maggiolina pastry shop where the familiarity of a neighborhood institution coexists with the technical ambition, international recognition and generational teaching that turned Santoro's original business into one of the major names in Italian pastry.
What you should know about Pasticceria Martesana.
Pasticceria Martesana is best known for Vincenzo Santoro transforming an apprenticeship begun in childhood into a Milanese pastry institution that became a training ground for internationally decorated pastry chefs. Born in Orta Nova, Puglia, in 1952, Santoro entered a bakery as a boy before following his brother Franco to Milan during the economic boom and continuing his education inside professional pastry kitchens. His career progressed through work with Franco, a period at Forte Village in Sardinia and an earlier independent operation in Piazza Greco before the Via Giovanni Cagliero shop became the enduring home of Martesana. Santoro returned to formal study in France in 1984 at the École de Gastronomie Ile Saint-Jeaux, bringing new techniques back to Milan at a stage when his command of leavened dough was already becoming central to his work. Two years later he created a cake reproducing Duomo di Milano for a visiting delegation of Spanish pastry chefs during the APAL event, a technically ambitious confection that became one of the defining works of his career. His brother Vittorio Santoro followed an equally consequential professional path, participating in the foundation of both the Accademia Maestri Pasticceri Italiani and CAST Alimenti during the 1990s. Davide Comaschi developed inside the Via Giovanni Cagliero laboratory before winning the Italian Under-26 chocolate championship in 2006, entering AMPI in 2010, taking silver at the Coupe du Monde de la Pâtisserie in Lyon in 2011 and becoming the first Italian winner of the World Chocolate Masters in Paris in 2013. Comaschi subsequently created a new advanced laboratory for Martesana before leaving in 2016 to lead Barry Callebaut's Chocolate Academy in Milan. Gambero Rosso awarded Martesana its Tre Torte distinction for the first time in 2015 and repeatedly renewed it, with the 2025 guide placing the pastry shop at 91 points. The original Cagliero location received Milanese Bottega Storica recognition in 2019, followed in 2020 by Santoro's victory for Italy's best panettone at Artisti del Panettone. Domenico Di Clemente joined as executive pastry chef that same year and became Santoro's principal successor in the laboratory. A €1.5 million capital increase in 2021 accompanied MEGA Holding, Eagle Capital Ventures and other investors acquiring a 60-percent majority, with the Santoro family retaining 40 percent and Vincenzo becoming honorary president. Expansion accelerated through Via Paolo Sarpi, Sant'Agostino, Mercato Centrale, Porta Romana and Como, taking a pastry shop once built around the Sunday habits of its immediate neighborhood into a multi-location business. Santoro received Iginio Massari's Ai Migliori Pasticcieri del Mondo award in 2023 and died in December 2024 at seventy-two, leaving Di Clemente and generations of former pupils to carry forward the technical school he had built around Martesana.
Natural fermentation forms the culinary center of Martesana through panettone, a preparation whose production extends across three days from repeated refreshments of the mother yeast through mixing, rising, baking, cooling and packaging. Panetun de l'Enzo carries Santoro's name into the current collection, connecting the founder directly with the leavened dough that dominated his professional life. Traditional Milanese panettone builds richness through butter, egg yolk, raisins and candied citrus before chocolate and fruit variations redirect the same slow fermentation toward different textures and aromatic profiles. Mignon pastry changes the scale completely, concentrating layered creams, fruit, chocolate, nuts and crisp bases into small constructions designed to make contrasting techniques legible in only a few bites. Chocolate introduces another branch of the laboratory through pralines, dragées and molded creations descended from the technical culture that produced Comaschi's World Chocolate Masters victory. Seasonal work shifts again at Easter through colomba and decorated chocolate eggs, allowing fermentation and chocolate to occupy parallel positions in the annual production calendar. Cakes bring those disciplines back together through sponge, mousse, cream, fruit, chocolate and glazed finishes, extending the precision of the miniature counter into larger compositions. Pasticceria Martesana moves through fermentation, miniature pastry, chocolate and composed cakes as interconnected disciplines, preserving Santoro's devotion to classical craft while leaving successive pastry chefs enough technical range to keep the original Cagliero laboratory moving forward.
How to fold Pasticceria Martesana into your trip.
Pasticceria Martesana works as the pastry anchor for a Maggiolina itinerary tracing northern Milan from a Sforza-era country residence through the architectural ambitions of the postwar Villaggio dei Giornalisti and into the surviving point where the Naviglio Martesana reaches the historic edge of the dense city.
Begin at Villa Mirabello, whose origins reach the early fifteenth century when Filippo Maria Visconti held a rural property here before Giovanni Mirabello acquired it in 1447 and gave the villa its lasting name. Pigello Portinari, director of the Milan branch of the Medici Bank and patron of the Portinari Chapel at Sant'Eustorgio, purchased the estate in 1455 and developed it as a country residence with Michelozzo participating in its architectural transformation; the Landriani later received Ludovico il Moro here on February 4, 1500 during his attempt to recover Milan, and twentieth-century restoration eventually accompanied the villa's conversion into a home and workplace for people blinded during World War I. Continue to Chiesa di Sant'Angela Merici, commissioned as the Villaggio dei Giornalisti and surrounding neighborhoods expanded rapidly after World War II. Mario Bacciocchi designed the church between 1958 and 1960, organizing its single nave around an elevated, top-lit presbytery and a baldachin of his own design; Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini established the parish in 1959, and Enrico Mattei became the principal financial supporter of construction, with the dedication honoring his wife Angela. Conclude at Cassina de' Pomm beside the Naviglio Martesana, where a fifteenth-century agricultural complex developed among apple orchards associated with Francesco Sforza's transformation of the northern countryside. The Marino and De Leyva families later used the property, an eighteenth-century conversion brought lodging and horse-changing functions to the canal route, and figures including Stendhal, Carlo Porta, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Napoleon became associated with the site; nearby, the Martesana reaches the point where its visible waters disappear beneath modern Milan after a journey initiated under Francesco Sforza in 1457 and made navigable to the city by 1471. The progression moves from Portinari and Michelozzo's fifteenth-century Villa Mirabello through Bacciocchi, Montini and Mattei's postwar church and culminates at Cassina de' Pomm, where Sforza agricultural history and the engineering of the Naviglio Martesana meet the modern city.
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