Caffè Quadri is an ancient, exclusive venue that is still found today in Piazza San Marco and contains the tradition of the extraordinary city of Venice. A class stop in one of the most evocative settings in the world. A local, or rather a coffee, remained true to itself over the centuries and has always attracted prominent personalities but has been able to renew itself, so that each guest can experience the feeling of not being alone in the presence of a great past , but in a modern, live and updated to the criteria of quality, goodness and health of the proposals.
Caffè Quadri History
The restaurant opened in 1638 under the name "Il Rimedio", due to the Malvasia wine sold inside which was thought to "reinvigorate the limbs and awaken the spirit". On May 28, 1775, Giorgio Quadri landed in Venice after leaving Corfù together with his wife Naxina, who had the idea of investing family assets in a room that sold "boiling water", coffee, an increasingly more fashion in the cosmopolitan Venice. In the city the seeds that the Turks called "khavè" were very widespread: in 1683 the first shop that sold it had already been opened under the Procuratie Nuove of Piazza San Marco.
During the period in which the Quadri was inaugurated, there were 208 rooms, of which twenty-four only on the Piazza. The two lovers then purchased the then Remedy, under the Procuratie Vecchie. Thus began the story of the Grancaffè Quadri, which will have another crucial passage in 1830, when the management passed to the Vaerini brothers. The two entrepreneurs restructure the interiors adding the Quadri Restaurant on the upper floor. The ground floor was decorated with pastel colored stuccoes, predominantly green and yellow, and completed with views and scenes of Venetian life, the work of the painter Giuseppe Ponga, inspired by the style of Pietro Longhi.
Around a cup of coffee, taken at the counter or at the table, politicians, merchants, plebeians and gentlemen have been gathering for centuries, to discuss politics, to prepare revolutions and conspiracies, to conduct business and love affairs. In the guestbook of Quadri, Stendhal, Lord Byron (in the three years of Venice always chasing girls, from one café to the next), Richard Wagner and Honoré De Balzac, who visited him in 1837.