Caffè Radetzky occupies a corner of the Porta Garibaldi neighbourhood — the design and publishing quarter north of the centre — and operates with the particular confidence of a place that has been serving the same clientele long enough that the furniture has become incidental. The interior is a classic Milanese bar-café: the marble counter, the high stools, the standing espresso culture that means a coffee takes four minutes from order to finish and nobody is in a hurry for those four minutes. The neighbourhood context is the Corso Como end of the city — design studios, fashion offices, the Eataly on Piazza XXV Aprile — but the café operates outside of that self-consciousness. It is, simply, a Milanese café that knows what it is in a district that is still finding out.
Porta Garibaldi, Milan, Italy