Discover Caffè Pedrocchi

A low neoclassical block on a corner of central Padua, fronted by two Doric porticoes with bronze lions at the steps, built with no outside doors on one side so that it could be entered from the street at any hour. Inside, the ground floor is a sequence of rooms named and decorated by colour — green, white, red — and the floor above is a suite of themed rooms in Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Renaissance manners.

Jappelli's building is austere neoclassical on the outside -- a low, colonnaded block with two Doric loggias, deliberately monumental for a coffee house -- and unrestrained on the inside.

The ground floor is arranged as three linked rooms named for the colours of the Italian flag: the White, Red and Green rooms, the last of which was the one where you could sit without buying anything.

The Piano Nobile above is the surprise: a suite of rooms each fitted out in a different historical style, from an Egyptian room with lotus capitals to a Moorish one, executed with a thoroughness that makes the eclecticism read as ambition rather than pastiche.