These are the establishments which, during the Risorgimento, witnessed episodes that led to the Unification of Italy. Brought to light by research for the 2011 edition of this Guide, which paid tribute to the 150th Anniversary of the Unification of Italy these stories have become part of the Association’s historical legacy.

At the Caffè Fiorio in Turin—a gathering place for staunch conservatives—on March 18, 1821, they attempted to persuade the assistant to the court apothecary to poison the medicine of Carlo Alberto of Savoy, who had just been appointed Regent and had promulgated the Constitution.

In Rome, during the uprisings of 1831, a large group of Roman artists—some from the French Academy and doctors from the Hospital of S. Spirito—tired of abuses, denunciations, arrests, and convictions, decided to storm the grenadier barracks in Piazza Colonna; they gathered and set out from the Caffè Greco.

Beginning in 1831, professors and students from Pisa, along with patriots, would gather at the Caffè dell’Ussero to read and discuss the “newspapers” that reported on the Carbonari uprisings in the Romagna region, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

The first demonstration of the existence of a unified Italian culture took place in 1839 in Pisa, with the First Congress of Italian Scientists, whose representatives were hosted at the Hotel Royal Victoria.

Located directly across from Palazzo Carignano—the seat of the Subalpine Parliament since 1848 and of the Italian Parliament since 1861—the Caffè Ristorante del Cambio has hosted all the great figures who shaped Italy and still preserves the table where Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, the first Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Italy, used to sit. But when he accompanied the House of Savoy to Mass at the Santuario della Consolata, Cavour would go to the Bicerin to wait for them to come out: his little table is still there, too.

On February 8, 1848, in the halls of the Caffè Pedrocchi in Padua, students and commoners formed an alliance, putting aside their differences, to oppose the Austrians in a bloody uprising.

During the popular uprisings of March 1848 led by Tommaseo and Manin, Caffè Florian experienced its baptism of blood by taking in the first wounded demonstrators from Piazza San Marco.

L’Antico Martini—perhaps because he met his wife there—was one of the favorite restaurants of the refined and timid Venetian military commander Count Ferdinand Zichy, whom the rebellious patriots forced to flee to Vienna during the Risorgimento uprisings of 1848.

To commemorate the fact that the Boeucc was one of the taverns and cafés where the Carbonari conceived the 1848 Uprisings in Milan, its owner in the 1940s created the “Quarantott” aperitif.

During the Five Days of Milan, Antonio Cova was appointed leader of the barricade against the Austrians that had been erected in front of his Caffè Cova, which was on the corner of Piazza della Scala; a rifle bullet whizzed through the café and remained lodged in a mirror for years.

In 1848, General Radetzky, fleeing from Milan toward the Quadrilatero due to the uprisings of the Five Days, camped his army right in front of the courtyard of Osteria La Rampina.

In Florence, on March 20, 1848, along with other shops, Gilli also supplied the Tuscan volunteers who were marching down Via Calzaioli on their way to the Battle of Curtatone and Montanara, where they faced Radetzky’s most efficient army in Europe.

On July 25, 1848, during the Battle of Custoza, the Piedmontese retreated to Valeggio and launched a counterattack against the Austrians there: the Antica Locanda Mincio found itself right in the thick of the fighting.

The Biaggi Restaurant in Lugano, the predecessor of the Grand Café Al Porto, served as a meeting place for Giuseppe Mazzini and exiled patriots from 1831 through 1870. In August 1848, he was there with Carlo Cattaneo; both had fled Milan following the failure of the Five Days. From then on, Cattaneo chose exile in Castagnola—now a neighborhood of Lugano—and visited the restaurant frequently.

Cavour planned to make Piedmont the leading force in Italian unification through a skillful foreign policy as well, such as the expedition to the Crimean War in 1855, led by General Lamarmora, whose cook—a Bersagliere—was the owner of the Corona Restaurant in S. Sebastiano Curone.

At the request of Garibaldi, one of the five brothers who founded the Hotel Des Iles Borromées in Stresa, Giovanni Omarini took General Bixio and a detachment of Cacciatori delle Alpi volunteers by boat on May 30, 1859, to the Lombard shore of Lake Maggiore to lead the attack on the fort at Laveno.

Francesco Crispi—the politician, Freemason, and Garibaldian who organized the Expedition of the Thousand and convinced Garibaldi to lead it—loved to spend time at the Caffè San Carlo in Turin, even after he became Prime Minister of Italy twice.

Two venues are linked to General Giuseppe Garibaldi and his “Expedition of the Thousand,” which—with the landing in western Sicily and the subsequent conquest of the entire Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1860—marked the beginning of the decisive phase of Italian unification: the Caffè del Tasso in Bergamo Alta, which served as a recruitment center for Garibaldi’s troops: after his triumphant entry into Bergamo on June 8, 1859—which put an end to Austrian rule over the city—Garibaldi issued a proclamation inviting young men to volunteer for the expedition to Sicily, and 174 set out with him the following year; the Antica Focacceria S. Francesco in Palermo, where legend has it that Garibaldi stopped to refresh himself during the occupation of the city.
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2,547 lire and 60 centesimi for 29 kilos of marron glacés, 18 of sorbet, 37 of candied fruit, pastries, jams, and meringues: it was a memorable bill from Stratta paid by Count Cavour in 1860 for a reception at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The villagers of San Desiderio—now a neighborhood of Genoa—who heroically took part in the campaigns of the Risorgimento certainly frequented the trattoria known as the Bruxaboschi, inspired by the ideas that the Ruffini and Mazzini brothers developed in that very area from 1830 to 1833.

A bronze plaque commemorates the fact that, on February 26, 1867, Garibaldi appeared on the first floor of the Procuratie Vecchie above Caffè Lavena and, saluting a liberated Venice, called for Rome to be the capital of Italy, to the cheers of the crowd in St. Mark’s Square.

On March 7, 1867, from the balcony of the Hotel Due Torri in Verona, General Giuseppe Garibaldi delivered a famous speech to the citizens on the unification of Italy and Rome, and that evening, he was invited by the city to an eight-course dinner at the hotel! The speech and the menu from that day are preserved at the Museum of the Risorgimento in Verona.