Milan

Milan keeps most of what is worth seeing behind a door. Its best rooms are inside other buildings: a hotel in a sixteenth-century seminary, a café designed by a film director in a former distillery, a bookshop that sells nothing but art monographs from a unit in the Galleria. Several of the sixteen addresses here have changed hands at least once, to a textile family, a fashion house or a pair of Venetian bartenders, and come through it intact.

Eat

Institutions

Trattoria Milanese (Via Santa Marta) — Open since 1933 on a narrow street in the old centre. The cotoletta is breaded twice, crumbs first, then egg, then crumbs again, and fried low and wide in butter; the waiters still wear white shirts and bow ties.

Da Giacomo (Via Pasquale Sottocorno) — Giacomo Bulleri opened his first Milan trattoria in 1958 and moved it here in 1989, when the decorator Renzo Mongiardino did the rooms. The kitchen is known for fish, and the dining room for looking as though it has always been there.

Newer Arrivals

Trippa (Porta Romana) — Diego Rossi and Pietro Caroli's trattoria on Via Giorgio Vasari. The fried tripe arrives like a bowl of crisps, the vitello tonnato's sauce comes out of a siphon, and the menu changes with the market. Tables are booked well in advance.