As artists and gallerists prepare their booths at warehouses across Milan for the Salone del Mobile design fair next week, one storefront on Via San Marco, in the Brera neighborhood, remains conspicuously empty. Locals know it as the former site of La Latteria di San Marco, Arturo and Maria Maggi’s restaurant, which shut down permanently in December.

Ever since it opened, in 1965, La Latteria was widely considered the city’s best restaurant. Patrons dined on simple foods—local vegetables, grilled Piedmontese beef, and their signature dish, spaghetti al limone (pasta with lemon zest). Seating consisted of eight small two-tops situated under an emergency-room glare. The restaurant was closed on weekends, and if you tried to call, more often than not you were greeted by an unintelligible Italian grumble followed by the click of the receiver.

Despite all this, over its 58 years in operation, La Latteria developed a cult following. Keith Haring and Elio Fiorucci ate there in the late 80s. Members of the Kennedy and Agnelli families were regulars, as were the filmmakers Roman Polanski, Roberto Benigni, and Luca Guadagnino.

They didn’t take reservations, so no matter who came in, if a table wasn’t available, they had to wait. “[Donald Trump’s] security detail called to reserve five tables,” Maria told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in 2000, “but we don’t make exceptions for anyone.”

Inside the shuttered 800-foot space, relics still hang from patrons past. Hundreds of paintings of roses—La Latteria’s symbol—pepper the walls. There’s a drawn-on tablecloth by Rita Ackermann, a Haring–designed plate, and a stencil by Geoffrey Hendricks, who created album covers for the Beatles. News articles from The New York Times, Corriere della Sera, and the Italian magazine Oggi are framed.

Closing was a difficult decision. Maria, 77, and Arturo, 85, were tired. “I did it for him,” Maria tells me when I visit the couple in their apartment, just above the restaurant. “We were working 16-hour days.”

Their sons, Roberto and Marco, who waited on tables there, won’t be taking it over. Though there was talk of a sale and reopening, a deal has yet to materialize.

The couple now spends quiet afternoons in the apartment, watching TV, writing, and sipping tea. The phone in the restaurant still rings every few minutes, and wayward tourists knock on the blinds from time to time. There won’t be a reply.

The Little Restaurant That Could

When Maria and Arturo opened up shop on November 1, 1965, they couldn’t have dreamt of the success their little restaurant would one day have. Maria moved to Milan with her family from Licata, in Sicily, in 1959, when she was 15 years old.

She met Arturo a year later, while working at a department store. He was 23, and owned a restaurant on Via Vittor Pisani, near the city’s central station. “He already had 18 employees.… But it wasn’t a sophisticated crowd,” Maria says. “The Germans wanted pasta with salad. It was hard to watch them eat.”

Shortly before they married, in 1964, Arturo closed Via Pisani to pursue his dream: a restaurant he and his wife could run on their own. “I’d never done this sort of work before,” Maria says, “but he knew I had a gift.”

“When I saw [the space on] Via San Marco,” Arturo says, “I knew it was perfect, because there was a building on one end, and a wall on the other. I would never fall into the trap of expanding.”

In 1965, Brera wasn’t the glamorous neighborhood it is today. There was a lonely tram stop in front of the restaurant, and Il Corriere della Sera’s offices were in the adjacent building. But the streets nearby were populated by brothels, prostitutes, and the Bar Jamaica, a hub for wayward artists.

Undeterred, they bought it, refurbished it, and opened up shop, Maria presiding over the dining room while Arturo cooked typical Milanese dishes. On the weekends, the couple went to their country house in the nearby Apennine region, which they still own, tending to the vegetables they served at the restaurant. “Arturo wanted calves, too, so we could serve our own meat,” Maria says, “but we just didn’t have the staff for it.”

It wasn’t the best time to be opening a restaurant in Milan. In 1968, Communist protesters staged an occupation of the Triennale Museum, marking the beginning of the Anni di Piombo (the Years of Lead), a term referring to the gun violence of the era. Post-World War II social upheaval created fertile ground for the emergence of terrorist groups like the far-left Red Brigades and the far-right Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari. In Milan, kidnappings and bombings were all too common, culminating with the assassination of prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. “I had some flower pots,” Maria says, which protestors “smashed … at the windows of the Corriere.”

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the influential Italian publisher and Communist, was a regular at La Latteria before he died in a bomb explosion in 1972. So was Oreste Scalzone, the left-wing activist who was sentenced to eight years in prison after he conspired to overthrow the Italian government. His followers Toni Negri and Franco Piperno came, too.

In 1979, when Scalzone and his followers were arrested, the Maggis learned about it on a breaking news TV channel. “I could hear they always talked politics,” Maria says, “but they were always very polite. We thought they were university professors.”

As the climate in the city changed, with violence giving way to a renaissance of sorts, so did the restaurant’s clients. By 1979, Milan’s Fashion Week had eclipsed Paris’s in terms of volume and profit. The golden years of Milano da bere (Milan to drink), of fashion and debauchery, had begun.

Miuccia Prada became a regular, as did Elio Fiorucci, Giorgio Armani, the Sozzani sisters, and the Versace family. Fashion brought the design crowd—as Salone del Mobile, which had started in 1961, gained steam, the Italian dealer Nina Yashar, of Nilufar gallery, stopped in. So did the architect and designer Matteo Thun, who would later organize an exhibition of Murano glass inside the restaurant.

As the city regained its financial footing, business owners also started flocking to La Latteria. Gianni Agnelli, the head of Fiat, dined there, as did his rival Carlo de Benedetti, the owner of the L’Espresso media conglomerate. Everyone waited in line and drank the house wine.

The mid-90s marked a shift in Arturo’s cuisine. During a summer holiday in Tuscany’s Maremma region, he came across a book by the 16th-century chemist Paracelsus, the first physician to treat physical ailments with food. Arturo was inspired, and embarked on a decade-long obsession with food’s natural healing properties.

In 1998, to remove what he calls the “innate acidity in agricultural produce,” Arturo had solid-silver cooking pans welded from local jewelers. Each is worth approximately $5,000. He began to cook with them exclusively.

He also studied the phases of the moon and changed the menu every day accordingly. Certain vegetables—like artichokes, spinach, and zucchini—were served only on specific days of the week. And he never used olive oil in the kitchen, opting instead for sunflower oil, which he says is lighter on the stomach.

Arturo has since written a draft of an elaborate book on alchemy, astrology, and food. When I ask him if he wants to publish it, he shakes his head vehemently. “People would say I’m crazy.”

Yet his methods have attracted high-profile figures in the culinary world. After a visit to La Latteria in 2015, Sam Kass, Barack Obama’s personal chef during his presidency, reportedly served spaghetti al limone to the president himself. Around that time, the couple made a rare exception to their no-reservations rule for members of the U.S. delegation. (Though Obama had planned to attend, his security team ultimately advised against it, citing the restaurant’s lack of an emergency exit.) “It was the first time we ever put tables together, but you know, they were American ministers … it wasn’t normal folk,” says Maria.

Kass and the Maggis have remained close. When Obama traveled to Milan to make a speech on climate and food security in May 2017, Maria and Arturo left a note in the doorway of the restaurant, citing a broken oven. Then they headed to the Rho Fiera pavilion and sat in the third row while the former president spoke.

Over the last decade, on any given night, dining at La Latteria meant encountering members of the Loro Piana family, an actor or two, and plenty of locals. “More than a restaurant, it was a community,” the Italian writer Nicolò Castellini Baldissera says. “In the 80s and 90s all of the tables were communal and you never knew who you might sit next to, and some of that sentiment remained until it closed.”

“It was one of the last places where you could walk in alone and know people,” one regular, the music-agency founder Charles Berthoud, remembers. “And the food was so light that you could go there every day.”

Last year, when Madonna’s team called the Maggis repeatedly, asking them to open for her on a Sunday night, Maria refused.

“Going to La Latteria was like going to a school of life—I learned something new each time,” Ludovico Bonaccorsi, the founder of Milan’s LùBar (and my boyfriend) says. “My favorite moments were at the end of the shift, when Maria or Arturo would sit down to chat with me. We shared moments of camaraderie and joy.”

Closing day, on December 22, 2023, was unseasonably warm, and the couple hosted their regular clients for free, serving up mountains of spaghetti al limone. Out front, 300 roses were lined up on the sidewalk. Clients from around the world crowded the small entryway. Some brought gifts and mourned. Many still stop in on the elderly couple.

“We lived through births, deaths, birthday celebrations,” Maria says. “Generations of Milanese people were born and died while we were running this place. It was a small place. But it took on a whole life of its own.”

Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL