Why you should experience Rabbit Hole Cafè in Milan, Italy.
Rabbit Hole Cafè is a theatrical tearoom where Centro Storico's dense commercial character, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, immersive set design and Silvia Scattareggia and Roberto Saccomando's fascination with themed hospitality converge inside Galleria Mazzini.
Set along Via Giuseppe Mazzini near Via Dogana and just steps from Piazza del Duomo, the café occupies a central passage where the medieval street pattern around Via Torino meets Milan's principal retail core, with department stores, historic churches and the vast cathedral square unfolding across the surrounding blocks. Two floors divide the interior into environments inspired by the White Rabbit, Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat and Queen of Hearts, using flowers, playing cards, chess references, saturated colors and theatrical furnishings to turn movement through the café into a sequence of changing scenes. Costumed staff and character appearances extend that visual concept beyond decoration, with the Mad Hatter's social table giving one of Lewis Carroll's best-known gatherings a physical place inside the room. The result is a Centro Storico tearoom where Scattareggia and Saccomando translated a literary world into a fully developed hospitality setting within minutes of the Duomo.
What you should know about Rabbit Hole Cafè.
Rabbit Hole Cafè is best known for the entrepreneurial journey of Silvia Scattareggia and Roberto Saccomando, whose years of travel through Japan, Singapore and other parts of Asia introduced them to the scale and variety of themed restaurants that inspired their own venture in Italy. Scattareggia studied psychology before developing an interest in pastry and pursuing specialist courses, as Saccomando brought training as a graphic designer into the management side of their emerging hospitality project. The couple opened the original Rabbit Hole in Palermo in 2017, building their concept around a coordinated relationship between food and a fictional setting at a time when dedicated themed tearooms remained unusual in Italy. Their ambitions eventually outgrew the first operation, and they closed Palermo before committing greater investment to a Central Milan location capable of supporting the elaborate concept on a larger commercial stage. Rabbit Hole Cafè opened inside Galleria Mazzini in December 2021, becoming the second chapter of a business that had begun four years earlier in Sicily. The move placed Scattareggia's pastry background and Saccomando's graphic training inside a substantially larger two-level environment near the Duomo, establishing Milan as the new center of the project. By February 2023 Saccomando was preparing an international step for the format after the Milan opening exceeded the couple's expectations, with London selected for the planned expansion. The business subsequently developed under The Wonderland Company and extended its programming beyond daily tearoom service through character-driven events and collaborations. October 2024 brought a cosplay procession created with costume artists AuraRinoa and The Lery Maker, beginning inside Rabbit Hole Cafè, crossing Galleria Mazzini and continuing into the nearby Super Heroes Art Gallery. A further interactive program in summer 2026 turned the fictional world into a game structured around a map, hidden clues, challenges and characters including the Queen of Hearts, Cheshire Cat, Mad Hatter and White Rabbit, carrying a project born from Scattareggia and Saccomando's Asian travels into live entertainment five years after the Milan opening.
The Brucaliffo tea provides one of the clearest pieces of edible theater through butterfly pea flower, whose infusion produces an intense blue color that changes as acidity alters its natural pigments. Torta Stregatto transfers the Cheshire Cat into American-style layer cake, using vividly colored strata to make the cut surface part of the presentation before Kit Kat cake shifts toward chocolate and confectionery. Pancakes move through fruit, chocolate, pistachio, maple syrup and ice cream combinations, with Pancake Sottosopra building a taller composition around pistachio and strawberry or chocolate spread and fruit. French toast enters both sweet and savory territory, including a version with soft egg, maple-glazed bacon and mixed leaves that pushes brunch away from the pastry counter. Wonder Spritz combines Prosecco, white vermouth, violet syrup, rose syrup, mint, lemon, soda and cotton candy, turning floral aromas and dissolving sugar into the drink's principal mechanisms. Butterfly Sour carries butterfly pea flower into tequila before triple sec, lemon and cane-sugar syrup introduce citrus against the botanical infusion. Alice's Dream joins violet and rose syrups with gin, vodka, lemon and egg white, as Stormy Cloud uses blue curaçao, peach liqueur, Prosecco, soda and cotton candy to build another color-driven composition. S'moretini finishes the sequence through Baileys, coffee liqueur, gingerbread syrup, chocolate and marshmallow, translating the American campfire sweet into a dessert cocktail.
How to fold Rabbit Hole Cafè into your trip.
Rabbit Hole Cafè works as the refreshment anchor for a Centro Storico itinerary moving through Renaissance optical invention, centuries of political power and the twentieth-century remaking of Piazza del Duomo as a home for modern Italian art.
Begin at Santa Maria presso San Satiro, whose origins reach 876 when Archbishop Ansperto di Biassono founded a small church dedicated to Satiro, Silvester and Ambrose before a miraculous Marian image prompted a major new building campaign during the fifteenth century. Donato Bramante confronted an exceptionally shallow site behind the altar by compressing an apparent 9.7-meter choir into 97 centimeters of physical depth, using modeled architecture and perspective to produce one of Renaissance Milan's great experiments in spatial illusion. Continue to Palazzo Reale, whose medieval Broletto function developed into ducal power under the Visconti and Sforza before French rulers transferred their court there during the early sixteenth century. Spanish governors expanded the palace after 1535 and introduced Milan's first court theater in 1594, then Giuseppe Piermarini rebuilt the complex between 1770 and 1778 for the Austrian court, opening the principal courtyard toward the Duomo and giving the palace the neoclassical form later occupied by Napoleon, the Habsburgs and the Savoy monarchy. Conclude at Museo del Novecento, housed since 2010 inside the Palazzo dell'Arengario designed by Enrico Agostino Griffini, Pier Giulio Magistretti, Giovanni Muzio and Piero Portaluppi during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Italo Rota and his team converted the building for Milan's twentieth-century art collections through a major intervention centered on a spiral ramp rising from the metropolitan level toward the upper galleries, placing works by figures including Boccioni, Carrà, Morandi and Fontana inside an architecture originally conceived during a radically different political chapter of the piazza. The progression moves from Bramante's fifteenth-century manipulation of physical depth at Santa Maria presso San Satiro through Piermarini's eighteenth-century reconstruction of Milan's seat of government into the conversion of the Arengario into Museo del Novecento and a permanent home for the city's twentieth-century art.
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