Caffe Pedrocchi Site Features

Jappelli's building is austere neoclassical on the outside -- a low, colonnaded block with two Doric loggias, deliberately monumental for a coffee house -- and unrestrained on the inside.

The ground floor is arranged as three linked rooms named for the colours of the Italian flag: the White, Red and Green rooms, the last of which was the one where you could sit without buying anything.

The Piano Nobile above is the surprise: a suite of rooms each fitted out in a different historical style, from an Egyptian room with lotus capitals to a Moorish one, executed with a thoroughness that makes the eclecticism read as ambition rather than pastiche.

The Green Room

The room where anyone could sit without ordering. Still there, still free to enter, and the reason for the café's nickname.

The 1848 bullet hole

Preserved in the White Room's wall, marked and deliberately never repaired.

The Piano Nobile

Jappelli's suite of themed rooms upstairs, now housing the Museum of the Risorgimento. Ticketed, and much less visited than the café below.

The caffè Pedrocchi

The house coffee -- espresso with mint cream -- is the thing people order, and is genuinely a local institution rather than a tourist invention.

The café sits on Via VIII Febbraio in the middle of Padua, directly opposite Palazzo Bo and a minute's walk from the market squares. Its position between the university and the civic centre is exactly why it became what it did.