Bar Sport Opens in Milan's Porta Venezia: A Vintage Neighbourhood Bar Where Sport Is a Shared Ritual

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Five friends have opened a vintage-style sports bar in Milan — think toast, prawn cocktails, matches on TV and table football. On Via Stoppani in the Porta Venezia district, they've turned their dream of reviving the 'old neighbourhood bar' into a place where sport becomes a collective ritual once again.

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Filippo Tortorici can almost recite a scene from Stefano Benni's book Bar Sport from memory — the 'Luisona', a brioche left untouched in the bar's display case for years, a symbol of a world of habits, rituals and characters that made the bar the heart of neighbourhood life. From that imagery was born the project of five university friends determined to bring back a venue that seemed to belong to another era: a place where people know each other by name, where football talk spills into politics, work and life, and where the regular matters more than the queue outside. And so, at 22 Via Antonio Stoppani in Porta Venezia, Bar Sport was born — to give the city back a neighbourhood spirit that feels lost amid endless cocktail lists and ever-more-polished venues.

An idea born among university friends

'It was a project I'd put down on paper last summer. Then the chance came up to take over this bar and I already had everything ready,' says Tortorici, known in the city as 'Milangeles', long active in event organisation and programming at the Apollo Club. Around him gathered the friends he'd shared his university years with in Pavia. Today there are five partners united by the idea that a bar can once again be a place of connection before consumption. 'We wanted to bring back a normalisation of bars. In recent years I've seen so many identical, expensive venues open. I no longer felt comfortable spending so much on a mediocre aperitivo. Let's make a place where prices are fair and quality remains.' Not nostalgia for its own sake, but an answer to a city that has lately multiplied formats built on aesthetics and novelty.

The return of the real postwar bar sport

In the postwar years, the bar was one of the few truly shared places. Not everyone had a radio, let alone a TV, so people gathered at the counter to listen to Sunday's radio commentary, follow the Giro d'Italia, fill in their Totocalcio pools coupons, or argue passionately about the latest match. Sport was above all a pretext for being together. Bar Sport preserves that spirit with many elements — most from Milangeles's home — that evoke that popular aesthetic: a wood-clad counter, a pinball machine, table football, a payphone, formica furniture, neon lights, old signs and a bookshelf devoted to sport. The aim is to build a community of regulars — an idea reflected in the welcome, where the people serving tables include lawyers, professionals and creatives who share the project as a community rather than a mere job.

Toast, bread with butter and anchovies, and prawn cocktail on the menu

The menu follows the same philosophy — essential and built around dishes from Italy's collective imagination rather than trendy gastronomy: toast, bread with butter and anchovies, prawn cocktail, caprese, hummus and a sharing board. The drinks list alternates great classics with cocktails renamed after champions like Roberto Baggio, George Weah, David Beckham, Ronaldo and Gabriel Batistuta. The toast, seemingly the simplest of dishes, becomes almost a manifesto: 'It's only bread, ham and cheese, but in Milan there are a hundred ways to make it. We tried many times before finding the right one.'

Keeping prices popular (dishes between €6 and €10, cocktails from €6) is also a statement. Because, as Benni's book teaches, a real bar sport isn't measured by the beauty of its counter, but by the stories it accumulates day after day. The menu expands for events, from the World Cup to Wimbledon, when friends like Santo Taco and Lato Mare often come to cook.

Events: from the World Cup to talks with former champions

Naturally, sport — told, discussed and remembered — remains at the heart of it all. During the Club World Cup, the venue became a meeting point for watching matches together, but Tortorici's idea goes beyond screening games: 'What we'd like to do is promote sporting culture.' For Wimbledon, Bar Sport hosted a live broadcast with the tennis community Wimby and the podcast Stesso Tennis, commenting on matches in front of an audience. The menu also follows the sporting calendar — strawberries and cream appeared during Wimbledon. The idea is to organise meetings with former champions who have since changed their lives: ex-footballers who became winemakers, chefs, fishermen, farmers or entrepreneurs.

'I'd like to invite people who are no longer athletes but once were. To sit them at the table with us, really get to know them and introduce them to our customers — people whose stickers we collected as kids and who now have another life to tell.' Tortorici says the greatest satisfaction, however, comes from the neighbourhood. Used to living in the south of the city, he discovered Porta Venezia precisely thanks to this project. 'We've met so many people who have lived here for years. We didn't want the usual bar frequented only by young people, but a place that could put twenty-somethings and lifelong locals at the same table. It's perhaps what we're most proud of.'