HISTORY
Ristorante Gran Caffè Quadri is one of the few restaurants in the world that can boast the enduring charm of being unchanged despite the passing of ages and fashions. So it is today that, as you sit in these rooms worthy of an aristocratic residence, looking out onto the Square, you still feel the atmosphere of those first cafés that changed the social habits of Europeans between the twilight of the Venetian Republic and the dawn of the modern age.
Its history has its roots on the distant 28 May 1775 when Giorgio Quadri, a Venetian from the Levantine territories, disembarked from a galley on Riva degli Schiavoni. Perhaps sensing the imminent break-up of the Republic's territories, Quadri had left Corfù, along with his savings and young and legendary Greek wife Naxina, to seek his fortune in Venice. It was the bubbly Naxina who first had the idea of investing the family's assets in a place that sold the "boiling black water".
The fashion of drinking coffee, a beverage obtained from a bean called Khavè by the Turks, had just started to catch on in the then cosmopolitan society of Venice. In fact, the first coffee shop had opened as early as 1683 under the Procuratie Nuove in St. Mark's Square. Contemporary accounts recorded that at Giorgio Quadri's time Venice had 208 bustling cafés, of which as many as 24 in St. Mark's Square. Naxina immediately scented a bargain and together with her husband bought an old coffee shop under the Procuratie Vecchie, on the corner of Sottoportego dei Dai. This place was already renowned in the city, having operated under the name of "Il Rimedio" since 1638, selling Malvasia wine considered at the time to be "a remedy" because it was believed, in the words of Tassini, "to reinvigorate the body and reawaken the spirit".
Politicians, merchants and businessmen then switched their habits from wine to coffee, including the Turkish variety which Quadri himself introduced to Venice. In 1830 the Quadri was restored by the Vivarini brothers, who gave the café a new lease of life by opening the upper floor as a restaurant. The ground floor rooms, with their distinctive stucco decorated in pastel shades of light green and yellow, were the natural backdrop for the splendid paintings by Giuseppe Ponga. His scenes of Venice followed the fashion of the time, while his scenes of daily life in the manner of Pietro Longhi adopted a truly personal style although also reminiscent - especially in the use of bright colours - of the great Tiepolo.
Two centuries later the entire world has changed but not Venice, the Quadri and the pleasure of meeting in an elegant, fashionable setting.
The Quadri is a way of feeling truly part of the city, attracting as frequent visitors in bygone eras the likes of Stendhal, Lord Byron, Alexandre Dumas, Wagner and Marcel Proust and in more recent times Gorbaciov, Mitterand, Woody Allen and many actors from the Venice Film Festival along with the "beautiful people" that for centuries have chosen to meet in this eternally fashionable spot.