Pogue Mahone’s, Milan – Foresyte Travel

Why you should experience Pogue Mahone's in Milan, Italy.

Pogue Mahone's is a storied Irish pub where Porta Romana's neighborhood culture, Milan's Irish community, Celtic music and more than three decades of public-house tradition converge around a Via Salmini institution.

Set along Via Vittorio Salmini near Corso Lodi and just steps from Piazza Medaglie d'Oro, the pub occupies the tight urban seam between Porta Romana's historic gateway and the residential streets around Via Crema, where restaurants, bars and neighborhood businesses continue south along one of Milan's oldest routes out of the center. Dark timber, densely layered Irish decoration, beer taps and closely packed tables give the rooms the accumulated appearance of a pub developed through decades of use, with the operation eventually spreading into adjoining premises and a sister restaurant across Corso Lodi. Rugby and football pull attention toward screens during major fixtures, then live bands and Irish music redirect the room toward the bar as standing crowds fill spaces normally occupied by seated groups. The result is a Porta Romana pub where interconnected rooms, decades of accumulated character and a corner deeply embedded in the surrounding neighborhood preserve the communal rhythm that has defined Pogue Mahone's since its earliest years.

What you should know about Pogue Mahone's.

Pogue Mahone's is best known for the partnership between Emilio Lomi and an Irishman named Patrick that created Milan's first Irish pub and established Via Salmini as a gathering point for the city's Irish community. Lomi wanted to open a venue during the early 1990s when a Milanese designer introduced him to Patrick, who was living in Milan and already wanted to run an Irish pub. The two joined forces and founded Pogue Mahone's in 1993, building its earliest following among Irish residents at a moment when the city had no established pub of the same kind. Patrick returned to Ireland after two years, opening a decisive second chapter for Emilio's nephew Massimiliano Lomi, soon known throughout the bar as Max del Pogue. Max took over management and spent years behind the counter, training generations of bartenders as the clientele broadened from an expatriate gathering place into a Milan institution shared between Irish, British and Italian regulars. Shane MacGowan supplied the pub's most consequential encounter with the culture behind its name in 1995, when Patrick attended a Milan concert by Shane MacGowan and the Popes, befriended the singer and invited him back to Via Salmini. Staff restricted entry to regulars that night as MacGowan drank at the bar with them, giving the pub a direct encounter with the frontman whose work with the Pogues had helped carry Irish folk music into punk. Growth eventually extended Pogue Mahone's into a second adjoining venue and Mahone's Restaurant across the street, creating three related premises around Via Salmini and Corso Lodi. The thirtieth anniversary in 2023 brought former and current staff together with Mad-A, Black Holy Whiskey, Redmoon Heroes, Andrea Rock & The Rebel Poets and DJ Gioma, demonstrating how the musical culture established during the pub's first generation had survived into the next. Gianluca, its manager by that anniversary, maintained the original public-house model as rugby and Gaelic football became another defining strand, with Pogue Mahone's developing into a meeting place for rugby followers and a Milan venue dedicated to screening Gaelic football. The 2026 Saint Patrick's Week extended that Irish cultural program across ten days through Gens D'Ys, Santi Bevitori Irish, Australian Celtic-punk band The Rumjacks, Rejoice, Granturna and Andrea Rock & The Rebel Poets, more than thirty years after Emilio and Patrick began the project.

Guinness anchors the drinking sequence through roasted malt, a creamy head and the cascading pour associated with nitrogenated stout. Kilkenny moves toward Irish red ale, bringing caramel malt and a gentler bitterness into the glass. Irish whiskey extends the malt profile into spirits, served neat or worked into hot whiskey with cloves and spices. Irish coffee combines another measure of whiskey with hot coffee beneath cream. Cider introduces fruit and acidity between darker pours. The kitchen follows the same geographic direction through Irish stew, where slow cooking brings meat and vegetables together in a substantial broth. Fish and chips adds battered fish and fried potatoes, and the neighboring restaurant develops the Anglo-Irish repertoire further through Guinness steak and other pub dishes. A pint beside one of those preparations establishes the straightforward food-and-drink pairing that has supported the pub through successive generations of regulars.

How to fold Pogue Mahone's into your trip.

Pogue Mahone's works as the evening culmination for a Porta Romana itinerary tracing Spanish rule, the Ospedale Maggiore's eighteenth-century burial complex and Milan's twentieth-century reinvention of a wholesale market pavilion through theater.

Begin at Porta Romana, constructed at the southern entrance to Milan's Spanish Walls for the arrival of Margaret of Austria, bride of Philip III of Spain, at the close of the sixteenth century. Aurelio Trezzi developed the ceremonial gate around three arches with Doric architectural treatment and sculptural ornament, and Carlo Buzzi later altered the structure during the seventeenth century, leaving a surviving fragment of the defensive system that once encircled Spanish Milan. Continue to Rotonda della Besana, where the Ospedale Maggiore began building a new burial ground in 1695 under Arrisio Arrigoni and conducted its first interments in 1697. Construction of San Michele ai Nuovi Sepolcri began in 1719, then Francesco Croce developed the surrounding portico after groundwater infiltrated the burials and the original capacity proved inadequate; silk merchant Giambattista Annone helped finance completion of the enclosure in 1731, producing the unusual brick complex that survives around the former church. Conclude at Palazzina Liberty Dario Fo e Franca Rame, designed by Alberto Migliorini in 1908 as a café-restaurant and commercial meeting point within the Verziere wholesale market that occupied the surrounding territory until 1965. The building survived demolition of the wider market, then Dario Fo and Franca Rame's La Comune occupied it from 1974 to 1980 as a theater laboratory, beginning a cultural chapter later continued through restoration, orchestral programming and its 2017 dedication to Fo and Rame. The progression moves from Trezzi and Buzzi's ceremonial entrance through Arrigoni, Croce and Annone's expansion of the Ospedale Maggiore burial complex into Migliorini's market pavilion and its reinvention by Dario Fo and Franca Rame as a center for Milanese performance.

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