To sit in Gerry’s, the cozy and elegant lobby bar of the Grand Hotel et de Milan, nursing a Grand Campari, Spritz, or Negroni, is to feel like you’ve discovered the living room of Milan. The Grand Hotel was built in 1863, a short hop up Via Manzoni from La Scala. It might have been the convenient location that prompted Giuseppe Verdi to take up his fabled residence at the hotel starting in 1872, but he was surely also drawn to the hotel’s neo-Gothic grandeur, not to mention cutting-edge hydraulic elevator. The place went on to draw the likes of Caruso, Hemingway, and Nureyev, and continues to be an energy center during Milan’s fashion and design weeks. It’s both up-to-the minute and fabulously anachronistic, at once a buzzing 21st-century hive and an oasis of Old World charm, with a heady aura of intrigue, glamour, and bohemianism. You can even book Verdi’s old room: it’s suite 105/106. When you plop your laptop on the desk, just remember that il maestro composed Falstaff and Othello on it. —Mark Rozzo

Mark Rozzo is an Editor at Large for AIR MAIL and the author of Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles