Coffee With Canova: Having Coffee In Rome Between Amazing Sculptures

In the soft light of late afternoon, the larger-than-life sculptures of Ristorante Atelier Canova Tadolini seem to glow, pearlescent, against the restaurant’s crimson walls. Ten-foot, toga-clad patricians and outsize classical goddesses crowd the spaces between white-napped tables, while a soldier on horseback looms over a couple seated at a table with a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino.

From somewhere behind the bar, an espresso machine hisses. There’s a clink as a barista places a little porcelain cup and saucer in front of a shop assistant on a break from her shift at the Valentino store, just down Via del Babuino. In front of her, a small model of Antonio Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss is a quiet reminder that this place, today a bar and restaurant, was once the great Neoclassical sculptor’s atelier.

The crowds of statues make the space seem small—claustrophobic, even—but Canova’s studio, which he shared with his protege Adamo Tadolini, was in fact quite extensive. Wandering through the interconnected rooms, past the chamber at the back where the tools the sculptors once used are displayed, and up a creaky staircase to the sculpture-lined second-floor dining rooms, it’s easy to imagine the space as it was in 1818, the year Canova moved in.

By then the artist had been appointed inspector general of fine arts and antiquities for the Papal States, and had received commissions from Napoleon. Though he did stints in Venice, Vienna, and Paris, he spent much of his life in this appealing corner of Rome, and created many of his most iconic works here. At the time, the area—known as the Tridente—was populated by artists and poets, including John Keats, who lived in an apartment on the Piazza di Spagna and who, like Canova, drew inspiration from classical Rome.

Nowadays you’ll find elegantly dressed Romans drinking Aperol spritzes on Via del Babuino, a narrow street that runs from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza di Spagna. Some locals visit Canova Tadolini for the food (the spaghetti alia carbonara is perfectly fine) but the atmosphere is the real selling point. The restaurant is magical for one simple reason: It invites you to linger with the art, to exist alongside it. Surrounded by Roman history, it’s easy to feel that the city may reveal its secrets to you, if only you could stay for one more glass of Brunello.