Caffe Pedrocchi Historical Timeline

Origins

Antonio Pedrocchi inherited a modest coffee house and spent years and a great deal of money replacing it, commissioning the architect Giuseppe Jappelli. The new café opened in 1831 next door to the university, which supplied its clientele.

Turning points

On 8 February 1848 students and police clashed inside the café during the anti-Austrian risings; a bullet hole from that day is still preserved in the wall of the White Room, deliberately left unrepaired. The street outside, Via VIII Febbraio, is named for the date.

Influential people

Jappelli designed both the café and the extravagant upstairs floor, the Piano Nobile, as a sequence of rooms in different historical styles -- Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, Moorish, Renaissance -- an eclectic exercise typical of the period and unusually complete here.

Cultural evolution

Through the 19th century the café functioned as the meeting place of Padua's intellectual and political life, with Stendhal among its recorded admirers. Pedrocchi left it to the city on his death, and it has been municipal property since.

Present-day significance

It still operates as a café, and the Piano Nobile upstairs is a museum of the Risorgimento. The ground floor rooms are open to anyone walking in, which is closer to the founder's intention than a purely commercial reading would allow.