Overview
An atelier-museum where you can drink coffee while surrounded by more than 400 works of art
In the beating heart of Rome, the Eternal City, between Via del Babuino and Via dei Greci, you can enjoy a coffee or lunch among busts, sketches and preparatory models by the great Antonio Canova and his trusted pupil Adamo Tadolini. This unique place, largely unknown among most of the tourists who visit the capital, is the Museum-Atelier Canova Tadolini, currently owned by the Galleria Antiquaria Benucci, which was transformed in 2003 into a restaurant-cafe where you can live and breathe art.
Tables are dotted throughout several themed rooms, including the Anatomy Room, the Room of Paolina and the Room of Adamo. Visitors find themselves immersed among busts of popes, wings of archangels, and statues of monarchs, saints and pagan gods, positioned in an extraordinarily disorderly way, in an effort to preserve the original atmosphere of the atelier.
For a magical place to enjoy lunch or dinner among almost two centuries’ worth of sculpture, it is open on Via del Babuino 150/A every day between midday and 11 p.m., or, for just a coffee, from 8 a.m. to midnight.
