Andria (Barletta-Andria-Trani). Two of the great names in Andria were loyal friends of the family at the Confetteria Mucci Giovanni, coming personally to buy their confectionery and, especially, the traditional carnival delights: Count Onofrio Iannuzzi, senator from the first to fifth legislature of the Republic under Prime Minister De Gasperi, one of the fathers of the Italian Republic, and Cardinal Corrado Ursi, Archbishop of Naples.
Arezzo. Senator Giulio Andreotti, who served seven times as Prime Minister of the Italian Republic, stopped by the “La vita è bella” room at the Caffè dei Costanti in 2008. He had heard about the place from a former fellow soldier and was curious to see the venue and the renovations that had been done. Together with the managers, he discussed the issue of alcohol abuse among young people and others.
Asolo (Treviso). The English poet Robert Browning discovered Asolo when he was 26, during his first trip to Italy: he set his first poem, “Sordello,” in this area; the town inspired his play “Pippa Passes”; and he dedicated his final collection of poems, “Asolando,” to the town. After 1878, he stayed there practically every time he came to Italy: he could even be found at the Caffè Centrale, sitting—as the story goes—right where the central sofa is today.
Bassano del Grappa (Vicenza). On May 27, 1987, the Queen Mother of England sipped a glass of grappa at the Grapperia Nardini on the Ponte, comfortably seated at a romantic little table in the corner near the window overlooking the Brenta River. She was visiting Bassano, and as she passed by the famous Grapperia, she ordered her escort to stop. To everyone’s surprise, she dashed inside, drank her beloved grappa, and left her regal signature, “Elizabeth R.,” along with the date, in the book of distinguished guests. She was very fond of Nardini, which she had known all her life and had chosen as the sole Italian spirit for her daughter Elizabeth II’s wedding.
Bologna. Invited to “Pavarotti and Friends” on September 12 and 13, 1995, Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, stayed at the Grand Hotel Majestic già Baglioni in Bologna in the fabulous Gianbologna–Guercino presidential suite. Giosuè Carducci also stopped by the Paolo Atti & Figli shop to buy tortellini in person: from 1860 onward, during the 43 years he taught Italian literature at the university, he became famous for his eloquence and his formidable appetite.
Bolzano. For literature lovers, Room 404 at the Parkhotel Luna Mondschein was occupied by the writer Luis Sepúlveda in 2008.
Burano (Venice). Right in the middle of the main dining room at Ristorante da Romano stands a table for 4 to 6 people known as “the painters’ table” because, in the years following World War II, artists such as Pio Meneghini, Filippo de Pisis, and Emilio Vedova used to sit there after their painting excursions on the island. The owner, Romano Barbaro, had the table fitted with small drawers where the painters could store their sketchbooks and pencils. Even Chaplin and Callas chose to sit at this table. The dining room is unmistakable: it’s the one with walls covered in paintings “packed as tightly as stamps” (as Orio Vergani, founder of the Italian Academy of Cuisine, once wrote).
Caprile-Alleghe (Belluno). Beginning in the summer of 1884, for health reasons, the poet Giosuè Carducci began spending his vacations in the mountains. In 1886, he was staying at the Albergo alla Posta in Caprile, in what was then Room 3 with a view of Mount Civetta (ask the fifth generation of the Pra family which room it corresponds to today!), where he finally completed his famous poem “Davanti a San Guido” during a particularly creative period. “Carducci was enthusiastic about the meals served to him by my grandparents, which consisted of game and stream trout,” recalls owner Floriano Pra, and Carducci wrote, “I fall asleep reading Shakespeare. I eat excellent meats, trout that taste like nymphs; I play briscola and I would write poems.”
Castiglioncello (Livorno). The playwright and writer Luigi Pirandello, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, spent his vacations at the Hotel Miramare with the famous actress Marta Abba, his muse, from 1928 to 1933: they always stayed in Room 24.
Cernobbio (Como). Alfred Hitchcock stayed in Room 133 of the Grand Hotel Villa d’Este for the first time in 1925, when he found inspiration for his directorial debut, the film *The Pleasure Garden*, for which he shot several scenes right in the hotel’s park and in Cernobbio. He fell so in love with Villa d’Este that he spent his September vacations there until 1970—always in his “133.”
Cogne (Aosta). Whilst on holiday in early September 1931, King Albert I of Belgium, his daughter Maria José of Savoy and Umberto of Savoy stayed in rooms 210 and 310 at the Hotel Bellevue & Spa: a lovely photograph shows them looking out from their respective balconies, and their signatures can be found in the guest book. The Italian royal family – and with them the European aristocracy – often visited Cogne, not least because the Gran Paradiso was a royal hunting reserve.
Cortina d’Ampezzo (Belluno). “We saw him arrive with his suitcases and his wife Mary one day in January 1951. We knew Hemingway well, because he’d been a regular at our bar, drinking martinis and red wine, since 1948, when he’d rented the little Villa Aprile. And he knew Cortina well and loved it, because he could work in peace, because he ate well at Rachele’s, and because our barman Renato would listen to him for hours. “We gave him room 107, which has remained exactly as it was ever since and is now named after him.” Marisa Manaigo, the heart and soul of the legendary Hotel de La Poste, recalled the great American writer’s stay at her hotel in these words.
From 1978 to 1987, the actor Renato Salvatori – a friend of the Menardi family and the unforgettable star of films such as Mario Monicelli’s ‘I soliti ignoti’ and Luchino Visconti’s *Rocco and His Brothers* – spent his summer and winter holidays in room 223 at the Albergo Menardi.
Cremona. Giuseppe Verdi would regularly visit the counter at the Negozio Sperlari to personally select and order Italian and foreign wines and confectionery, which he had sent to his villa in Sant’Agata, near Piacenza – the place he chose as his permanent home from 1848 and where he composed his major operas alongside his partner, and later wife, Giuseppina Strepponi.
Cuneo. On 8 May 1954, Hemingway himself turned up at the counter of the Caffè Pasticceria Arione to buy two kilos of the famous ‘Cuneesi al Rhum’ to take to his wife, who was on holiday in Nice. It had been his publisher, Arnoldo Mondadori, who had recommended that tasty stop-off on the way to France. And whilst he was there, true to form, the writer also enjoyed an aperitif.
Florence. November 1966. Whilst filming the documentary *Per Firenze* for Rai – a magnificent account of the city during the dramatic days of the flood – every evening the director Franco Zeffirelli and Richard Burton, who was accompanied by Elizabeth Taylor, would dine at Ristorante Sabatini at the ‘terrace’ table (no. 15) overlooking the inner garden. Zeffirelli chose Burton’s dramatic delivery as the Italian voice-over to explain to the whole world what an immense tragedy the flood was for his city.
In the small room with the Art Nouveau window at the Gran Caffè Giubbe Rosse, the Futurists’ incredibly rowdy arguments would always break out, complete with slaps in the face exchanged between Marinetti and Soffici in the name of art.
A historic photograph, taken in 1951, shows Papini, Soffici, Spadolini and Bargellini (the legendary mayor of Florence during the 1966 flood) gathered around a table beneath the arches of the Caffè Ristorante La Loggia in Piazzale Michelangelo.
Gardone Riviera (Brescia). In 1949, during the two weeks straddling July and August, Winston Churchill stayed at the Grand Hotel Gardone in room 310; room 316 was reserved for any guests, but the entire third floor was kept at the statesman’s disposal for security reasons: 11 rooms overlooking the lake and 4 facing the main road! Churchill arrived with a double security detail and 44 pieces of luggage in tow; he immediately disappeared into his room, came back down in his slippers, dressing gown and cigar, and went for a backstroke in the lake, driving the reporters chasing after him round the bend.
Genoa. The composer Giuseppe Verdi, who spent his winters in Genoa from 1874 to 1900 in a flat at Villa del Principe with his wife Giuseppina Strepponi, loved to go shopping in person and very often visited the Confetteria Romanengo in Via Macelli Soziglia to choose the delicacies he liked best. He left us a record of his passion for Romanengo in a letter dated 1881 to his friend Count Opprandino Arrivabene.
Lucca – Sesto di Moriano. The actress Paola Borboni, a legendary figure in Italian theatre with an extraordinary career spanning from 1916 to 1994, who caused a scandal in Italy in 1925 by being the first to bare her breast on stage in *Alga marina* at the Manzoni Theatre in Milan, and in 1941 in the film ‘La cena delle beffe’ by Alessandro Blasetti, was a frequent and delighted visitor to the Antica Locanda di Sesto in the 1990s: she loved sitting at table number 7 in the main dining room.
From the 1980s onwards, after every concert he conducted at La Scala, Maestro Claudio Abbado would have lunch at one of the corner tables in the columned hall of the Ristorante Boeucc. For official meetings, he would choose the private dining room with the large oval table.
At the bar of Caffè Camparino, as was customary amongst artists, Marcello Nizzoli, Fortunato Depero and Marcello Dudovich – the pioneers of modern advertising posters and creators of the most famous ‘réclames’ of the early 20th century – loved to enjoy an aperitif.
Antonio Greppi, Milan’s first mayor after the Liberation, one of the founders of the National Liberation Committee of Northern Italy and a member of the Resistance, used to enjoy sitting at one of the tables on the terrace of the Bar Gin Rosa in the Galleria San Babila during the 1950s.
Wherever you sit at Bar Jamaica – at the bar or at a table – you’ll be sitting in the very spot once occupied by Camilla Cederna, Piero Manzoni, Emilio Tadini, Gianni Dova, Roberto Crippa, Bruno Cassinari, Ernesto Treccani, Lucio Fontana, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Salvatore Quasimodo, Benito Mussolini, Allen Ginsberg, Dino Buzzati, Ernest Hemingway, Enrico Baj and Dario Fo.
In 1986, Frank Sinatra stayed in the fabulous suite at the Hotel Principe di Savoia when he held the spectacular concert to mark the opening of the ‘PalaTrussardi’ on 27 September, with a full house and the first 23 rows entirely occupied by international VIPs. It was a landmark event, not only because it had been almost 25 years since he had last sung in Italy, but also because that concert marked the start of a new era of tours by major international stars in Italy – a tradition that had been interrupted since 1981 due to terrorism. Sinatra returned to Milan and to his suite in 1989 and 1991 for his final tour of Italy.
Al Teatro Nuovo nel 1996, protagonista straordinario del testo teatrale “Ultime lune” e già molto sofferente, Marcello Mastroianni sedeva tutte le sere dopo lo spettacolo al tavolo d’angolo della seconda sala al Ristorante a Santa Lucia.
Montepulciano (Siena). In the charming Sala Grande of the Caffè Poliziano, director Federico Fellini always loved to sit in booth number 2. In August 1992, Fellini, accompanied by his wife Giulietta Masina, was a special guest at the Caffè Poliziano to inaugurate the exhibition ‘I disegantori de Il Grifo’ (a historic magazine that featured the works of the greatest comic artists), which brought together splendid original comic art by Milo Manara, Danijel Zezelj, Andrea Pazienza, and Fellini himself.
Naples. At the Ristorante La Bersagliera, ask which was the favorite table of Totò—one of the greatest stars of Italian theater and cinema—where he was filmed enjoying spaghetti and sea bass with a good glass of wine: the footage was broadcast between 1953 and 1954 on “Settimana Incom,” the weekly newsreel that was shown before the feature film in all movie theaters until 1965. Totò never wanted to advertise for anyone, but he gave this gift to the owner, Donna Emilia Del Tufo—known to everyone as “la Bersagliera”—and to her son Agostino, with whom he loved to linger at the table for a chat whenever he dined alone.
From the post-war period through to the 1960s, the actor Eduardo de Filippo, the driving force behind Neapolitan theatre, loved to dine at Ristorante Umberto: his table was number 19 in the small dining room with the curtains. And often, when he was performing at the nearby theatre, he would ask for his meal ‘to take away’ whilst on stage, and it would be brought to him directly by the Di Porzio family.
Palazzolo sull’Oglio (Brescia). In March 2000, the Osteria della Villetta, on its Art Nouveau veranda, hosted two founders of the Nouveau Réalisme movement: celebrated by the Italian cultural scene, the guests at the table were the French art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Mimmo Rotella – the only Italian artist amongst the founders – on the occasion of the memorable gathering held at the Teatro Sociale in Palazzolo, organised by the Ambrosetti Contemporary Art Foundation and dedicated to these two leading figures in the cultural debate of the 1950s and 1960s. Both left their mark on the walls of the restaurant.
Pavia. Suite 216 at the Hotel Moderno was the favourite of the famous astrophysicist Margherita Hack, who, between 2004 and 2009, frequently visited Pavia to give a series of lectures at the prestigious Ghislieri University College and the University.
Perugia. In the 1960s, King Gustav of Sweden walked into the Pasticceria Sandri in Perugia, took his coffee and croissant, sat down at one of the indoor tables and, when he had finished, personally took his cup and plate back to the counter and said, “That’s the way to do it!”
Pesaro. In the late 1920s, the playwright and writer Luigi Pirandello stayed at the Hotel Vittoria, in room 306. He enjoyed spending time on the hotel’s famous terrace overlooking the sea, where he would often order the cocktail invented by the barman Alfredo, which he had named ‘Calcio di mulo’ (Mule’s Kick) due to its devastating strength.
Pisa. The poet and visionary Gabriele D’Annunzio stayed on several occasions at the Hotel Royal Victoria, where he always occupied room ‘17’, now renumbered 202. His well-known and remarkable superstition was very Anglo-Saxon in nature: he considered the number ‘13’ to be unlucky, writing it as ‘12 + 1’, and always wrote the year 1913 as ‘1912 + 1’.
Ponte a Moriano (Lucca). Between the 19th and 20th centuries, the poet Giovanni Pascoli would often stop for a meal under the arbour of the Ristorante Erasmo (which was then the trattoria ‘La presa dell’acqua’), as it lay directly on the route he had to take when returning from Lucca to his home in Castelvecchio di Barga. Ask Lorenzo and Paola Marcucci, representatives of the fifth generation of the family, to show you the old dining room where Marcello Mastroianni used to sit, and where the writer and director Mario Soldati dined with De Sica and Lollobrigida.
Recco (Genoa). At the slate table that now stands at the entrance to the Ristorante Manuelina, in the 1920s Ernest Hemingway, then the European correspondent for the *Toronto Star*, enjoyed salami and cheese focaccia alongside Ezra Pound, his partner the violinist Olga Rudge, and the young doctor from Rapallo, Giuseppe Bacigalupo, who, travelling in a Fiat Torpedo, had come across him with a broken-down car near Recco, come to his aid and taken him to eat with them. Whilst waiting for the mechanic at the Manuelina, Hemingway carved his name into the table, which is still faintly visible today.
In the spring of 1950, the President of the Italian Republic, Luigi Einaudi, stopped for lunch at the corner table in the banquet hall of the Ristorante Ö Vittorio whilst attending the historic inauguration of the new town hall, which had been rebuilt following the total destruction of Recco caused by the terrible air raids of 1943–44.
Rome. Chiara Bedini and Rory Bruce, the fourth generation to run Babington’s Tea Rooms, recall that “despite Mussolini’s anti-British policy, throughout the Fascist period and even during the Second World War, Babington’s remained open at all times, with its British sign clearly visible and its bold bronze lettering on a plaque of quintessentially Roman travertine. Paradoxically, at Babington’s, one might encounter high-ranking officials and politicians in the main room, whilst the third room, round the corner, just a few tables away, was frequented by the anti-fascist intelligentsia (who would come and go via the kitchen)”.
At Caffè Greco, in 1906, the legendary Buffalo Bill was photographed at the penultimate table on the right in the Omnibus room. But, amongst the countless famous figures who frequented this café – one of the most famous in the world – let me tell you which table was occupied by the painter Giorgio de Chirico, who lived very close by. He was a regular and always arrived punctually at midday for an aperitif, shy, with a few pencils in his pocket, which he used to sketch quick drawings for customers and waiters to earn a few extra banknotes to spend: his second wife, Isabella Far, worried about the artist’s great distraction, would in fact send him out with just enough money for a single drink at the Greco!
San Candido (Bolzano). In August 1989, the Hotel Cavallino Bianco hosted Giovanni Spadolini – a politician, journalist and essayist, and one of the leading scholars of Italian history between the 19th and 20th centuries, and as such also president of the Italian Institute for Historical Studies, founded by Benedetto Croce – in the Schloss Tirol suite.
San Polo di Piave (Treviso). In June 1918, during the First World War, whilst serving as a volunteer driver for the Red Cross stationed at Villa Ca’ Erizzo, on the River Brenta, Ernest Hemingway discovered the Locanda Gambrinus: he enjoyed sitting on the terrace overlooking the source of the River Lia, where he would dip homemade bread into Raboso Piave wine and where he was also particularly fond of the Elisir del Gambrinus liqueur.
S. Agnello di Sorrento (Naples). On 3 September 1902, from room 114 of the Grand Hotel Cocumella, where he stayed for a week with his brother Alexander, Sigmund Freud wrote a letter to his family describing the hotel’s beautiful grounds, with their pine, orange and lemon trees, and the extraordinary view of the Gulf of Naples that he could admire from the terrace: “The whole scene is magnificent. It is impossible to move on to see other views.”
Sant’Andrea in Percussina – San Casciano Val di Pesa (Florence). Niccolò Machiavelli himself, in his famous letter to his friend Francesco Vettori dated 10 December 1513, describes how he spent his days in exile on his estate at Sant’Andrea in Percussina, where the Medici had confined him on charges of conspiracy and where he wrote the political treatise ‘The Prince’, which he subsequently dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent in an attempt to regain his post as secretary to the Republic: he recounts with particular delight the afternoons spent until evening at the tavern – which he owned and which is now the Ristorante Albergaccio – playing cricca and tricche-trach with the innkeeper, the butcher, the miller and two brickmakers.
Santa Margherita (Genoa). In 1933, when Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the world’s first radio-telegraph and radiotelephone signals over a distance of 150 kilometres, in the form of 60-cm microwaves from the terrace of the Grand
Sirmione (Brescia). Between 1955 and 1958, whilst taking a break between tours, the soprano Maria Callas would sometimes stay at her husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini’s beautiful villa in the historic centre; she was frequently seen enjoying a Campari and soda at the Caffè Grande Italia, and a lovely friendship had blossomed with the owners, the Pagiaro family: her table was in the left-hand corner of the tea room, where she often worked on her scores in the company of the tenors Corelli and Di Stefano.
Sorrento (Naples). In 1986, the famous singer Lucio Dalla was a guest at the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria: on the large terrace overlooking the sea from his suite on the fifth floor of the Palazzo Rivale, whilst reminiscing about a famous guest from the past, he was inspired to compose ‘Caruso’, a song that went round the world, also in the voice of the tenor Pavarotti. The Fiorentino family has dedicated the ‘Lucio Dalla Apartment’ – the Dalla suite and junior suite 547 – to their late friend: it features the piano he used to play, his original records and, above all, his music.
Stresa (Verbania). At the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromées, the ‘Hemingway Suite’ (rooms 104, 105 and 106), where the American writer stayed in 1948, signing the guest book as ‘an old customer’: He loved this hotel dearly because, as a very young man, he had spent his convalescence here following a war wound in 1918 – whilst serving as a Red Cross volunteer – and it was on its terrace that he had begun to conceive parts of ‘A Farewell to Arms’, immortalising the hotel and the lake that had so captivated him.
Turin. At the Caffè al Bicerin, the table beneath the clock was the favourite spot of Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia and later the first Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Italy: on Sundays, when he accompanied the King and Queen to Mass at the Basilica della Consolata, he would sit here because it was the ideal spot from which he could keep an eye out for when the royals were about to leave the church and go to meet them to escort them back to the Castle.
In the 1990s, at the Ristorante Porto di Savona, the writer Mario Soldati had his own table in the corner of the small dining room next to the entrance, where he could smoke his cigar without causing too much annoyance to the other diners.
Tremezzo (Como). The Grand Hotel Tremezzo has dedicated the splendid Greta Garbo Suite to ‘La Divina’, where the actress stayed in the 1930s, surrounded by her legendary reserve. Garbo was very fond of the hotel and of Tremezzo, which she mentioned in the 1932 film ‘Grand Hotel’.
Trieste. Between 1910 and 1912, when he lived directly opposite on Via Barriera Vecchia, James Joyce would pop into Pasticceria Pirona in person to choose the liqueurs and wines he fancied.
The table in the furthest corner of Caffè Tommaseo, around 1848 – the year of the uprising against the Austrian Empire – was the favourite spot of the Istrian poet Pasquale Besenghi degli Ughi, regarded as “the greatest and freest voice of Romantic poetry to have resounded in Venezia Giulia at that time”, as the historian Giovanni Quarantotti recalls.
Venice. Room 243 at the Hotel Ala is dedicated to Countess Maria Tarnowska, the shrewd adventuress who, in the early 20th century, had her fiancé, Count Pavel Kamarowsky, murdered in order to get her hands on his vast fortune; Once discovered and put on trial, the young countess thus triggered the ‘Affair of the Russians’, which laid bare the scandalous and debauched lifestyle of the Russian aristocratic community in Venice, capturing the morbid curiosity of the whole of Europe. The room is situated in the very part of the historic Palazzo Maurogonato – which now forms part of the hotel – where the count was staying when he was fatally wounded by the countess’s young lover, whom she had manipulated and incited to shoot his older rival.
In 1877, the writer John Ruskin, author of ‘The Stones of Venice’, stayed in room number 2 at the Hotel La Calcina, which was then a guesthouse.
In 1834, in room number 10 of the Hotel Danieli, the turbulent and scandalous (by the standards of the time) affair unfolded between George Sand – the pen name of the unconventional and tomboyish French writer Amantine Lucile Dupin, who dressed as a man and smoked cigars – and the aristocratic and delicate poet and writer Alfred de Musset.
In 1890, in the Senate Room of Caffè Florian, a group of intellectuals conceived the idea of creating the Biennale, the prestigious international art exhibition in Venice, which was inaugurated in 1895: they were the poet and mayor of Venice, Riccardo Selvatico, and his friends Antonio Fradeletto, a senator of the Kingdom of Italy and essayist, and Mario de Maria and Augusto Cézanne, painters and architects.
The composer Richard Wagner, as depicted in Vincenzo Cadorin’s wooden sculpture, frequented the Caffè Lavena from 1879 to 1883, meditating and writing: he would sit in the right-hand corner of the first-floor loggia and, from the small window, observe the Basilica, the Doge’s Palace and the people in St Mark’s Square to draw inspiration: it was here that he completed the love duet from the second act of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ and worked on ‘Parsifal’. At five o’clock in the afternoon, his wife Cosima and their children would arrive for tea, a cognac and biscuits, which the owner, Carlo Lavena, baked in the three ovens at the Caffè Lavenino, in Calle Frezzaria.
The Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges loved Venice deeply and, between 1962 and 1965, he used to stay at the Hotel Londra Palace in the suite that now bears his name. Before him, it is worth noting the composer Tchaikovsky who, in 1877 – as a plaque recalls – completed the first three movements of his ‘Symphony No. 4’ whilst staying in room 106 of the hotel, which was then called the Beau Rivage.
In 1881, the writer Henry James stayed in room 47 of the guesthouse that is now the Hotel Ristorante Wildner. “I stayed at the Riva, on the fourth floor. The view from my room was ‘a thing of beauty’; the sparkling lagoon, the yellow walls of San Giorgio, the islands in the distance, the constant bustle of people on the quay, the gondolas. ‘Here I wrote, diligently every day, and finished – virtually finished – my novel,’ James wrote, alluding to the distractions that made it difficult for him to complete, in that very room, the novel ‘Portrait of a Lady’.”
Venice Lido. In 1985, when Marcello Mastroianni was filming part of Mario Monicelli’s film ‘The Two Lives of Mattia Pascal’ in Venice – based on Pirandello’s novel – he stayed for almost a month in the fairy-tale tranquillity of the Albergo Quattro Fontane: he occupied the ‘Ai Nani’ room in the La Barchessa annexe, where each room is named after a Venetian villa.
Verona. The writer Ernest Hemingway, in 1948–49 – a period when he was writing *Across the River and Into the Trees* in Venice and travelling to Verona to meet the publisher Arnoldo Mondadori and the publisher-printer Giovanni (Hans) Mardersteig, he was a frequent visitor to the Ristorante 12 Apostoli: he loved to sit in the corner of the dining room where his signature is now reproduced. Between 1975 and 1985, the pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli was often seen at the 12 Apostoli at the table on the left as you enter, whilst he spent months in Verona studying in solitude at the Toledano family’s house on the hillside; the Toledanos were friends of the Gioco brothers, the restaurant’s owners.
Villafranca (Verona). In the third small room, on the left near the old display counter, Caffè Fantoni still has its two oldest tables, with marble tops and cast-iron bases, where Trilussa and Fogazzaro used to sit and where the philosopher Rensi wrote his philosophical essay ‘L’irrazionale, il lavoro, l’amore’.
Lugano (Switzerland). In the beautiful Sala Cenacolo at the Grand Café Al Porto – where you can also book an unforgettable tête-à-tête – on 3 March 1945, the five men who saved Italy from the infamous ‘Operation Scorched Earth’ gathered around the table, Hitler’s apocalyptic plan, under which the Germans would have razed Italy to the ground before abandoning it should they have lost the Second World War. At that time, the venue was the Ristorante Bianchi; the operation was codenamed ‘Sunrise’. And in this room, the wealthy businessman and patriot Baron Luigi Parrilli, Professor Max Husmann – headmaster of a Zurich boarding school but in reality an adviser to Swiss intelligence – and Major Max Waibel, commander in Lucerne, of the counter-espionage centre gathering intelligence from Germany and Italy, convinced Lieutenant Guido Zimmer, head of German counter-espionage in Milan, and above all SS Colonel Eugen Dollmann – who represented General Wolff, head of the SS in Italy, and Field Marshal Kesserling, supreme commander in Italy – not to carry out Hitler’s terrible order should it arrive. And so it was.
Suite 107 is the most regal at the Hotel Splendide Royal because, in 2005, none other than His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, stayed here as the guest of honour at the ‘Panda Ball’, which took place at the hotel, the grand gala evening organised annually by the WWF to raise funds for the environment, during which he presented the prestigious ‘Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Medal’.
New York (United States). The most ‘presidential’ table at Barbetta Restaurant is number 23, where, in December 2012, former US President Bill Clinton dined with his wife Hillary – who was then Secretary of State – and his daughter Chelsea and her husband. But at Barbetta, you might also have come across Nixon, Ford…
Al Pacino’s favourite table at Caffè Reggio is outside, the first one on the left as you come in, where he was also photographed reading in 1989.