Café Florian in Venice, a favourite haunt of celebrities

The Café Florian

“Café Florian is an indefinable institution in Venice.

Merchants conduct their business there, and lawyers arrange meetings there to discuss their most thorny cases.

Florian is at once a stock exchange, a theatre foyer, a reading room, a club and a confessional; and it is so well suited to the simplicity of local affairs that some Venetian women are completely unaware of their husbands’ occupations, for if they have a letter to write, they go to this café to write it.

Naturally, spies abound at the Florian, but their presence sharpens the Venetian wit, which can, at this venue, exercise that prudence once so famous.

Many people spend their whole day at Florian’s; indeed, Florian’s is such a necessity for certain people that, during the intervals, they leave their friends’ boxes to pop in and find out what is being said there.”
Honoré de Balzac

Coffee, sorbets and ice creams, and impeccable service!

The Café Florian

“Café Florian, a café that brings together up to a hundred, even a thousand people every evening, a café that has not closed for a hundred years, and is as well known in Venice as St Peter’s Tower is here.

Oh, what a marvellous establishment! Oh, what royal efficiency!

It’s on St. Mark’s Square: chairs, tables, drapes, sorbets, sweets, lemonades – everything is ready at all hours, and for as many guests as arrive.

With a single glance, the waiter has taken note of your thirty-six whims, and with a flick of the wrist he conjures up before you a mountain of crisp pastries and iced drinks.

One of these waiters, evidently gifted with that exquisite insight which, with a single glance, gauges one’s purse and reads one’s appetites, lavishes upon us discreetly flattering attentions; by turns anticipating and illuminating our desires, he soon becomes our old and faithful friend.”
Raoul Töpffer – A Journey to Venice 1842

The Florian: The Night-time Haunt of the Famous

The Café Florian

“We walked beneath the arcades of the Doge’s Palace, passed through those of the Procuratie Vecchie, and stopped at the Café Florian, famous in Venice for over a century.

Like the former Café de la Régence in Paris, it has seen a whole host of famous men take their seats on the sofas in its two small frescoed salons, and rest their elbows on its white marble tables, lingering and savouring the golden sabayon, the snow-like sorbet, the hard ice creams, the Turkish coffee and the vanilla hot chocolate.

Café Florian stays open all night.

A clean-cut, alert and very pale old bachelor, who has been working the night shift there for thirty-five years, brings us steaming mocha in small Chinese cups.

Every morning at five o’clock, he goes to bed at the sound of the harbour cannon and gets up at three o’clock to resume his busy and monotonous work.


The Café Florian He had witnessed many a wild night at the Venice Carnival, back when Venice still had a carnival and the mysterious, laughing masked figures would pass one another, calling out to each other beneath the arcades of the Procuratie.

He remembers the exiled kings and princes, the victorious and insolent generals, and amongst them Marmont, crippled and taciturn, dragging the memory of his betrayal through Venice.

In their serene or tormented sadness, he saw the immortal artists and poets: Chateaubriand, followed as if by a shadow by his inexorable boredom; Manzoni, in the days of his pure youth; Byron, in the days of his beautiful romances; Cimarosa, despite the hospitality of the lagoon that cradled him like a mother, dying before his time as a result of the cruel banishment inflicted upon him by the barbaric Cardinal Ruffo and the infamous Caroline of Naples.

Canova, who came to Venice to die peacefully; Léopold Robert, in despair, who took his own life there in a bloody manner; Alfred de Musset, melancholic and scornful; Balzac, drowning the disappointments and ugliness of life in the splendours of his universal psychology.

Many others too have departed from the throng of the living and shine amongst the throng of spirits whom the earth remembers.”
Louise Colet – Italy of the Italians 1862