The Noble Floor is located above the famous Caffè Pedrocchi, built between 1826 and 1842 by Giuseppe Jappelli. The structure consists of a series of rooms, each furnished and decorated to recreate the typical setting of a particular historical period. This creation aligns with nineteenth-century eclecticism, the taste and interest in past styles.
In 1816 Antonio Pedrocchi, son of a coffee maker of Bergamasque origin, intent on expanding his café to make it “the most beautiful on earth,” purchased a group of small houses located north of his property. The project was entrusted to the great Venetian architect Giuseppe Jappelli, who began the work in 1826 during which important architectural fragments from the Roman era came to light, now preserved at the Civic Museums at the Eremitani. Jappelli, transferring a secular and Enlightenment vision of society into architecture, made it his masterpiece, creating one of the city’s symbols. He solved the difficult problem of coordinating spatially different façades, which occupied a roughly triangular area, building from the Pedrocchi square side two buildings with Doric loggias visually united by another Corinthian loggia on the noble floor. The interior is organized around the monumental central red hall with a semicircular back, divided into three parts by Ionic columns and decorated on the walls with large maps. On its sides symmetrically open the white room to the south and the green room to the north corresponding to the loggias.
The upper floor was opened in 1842, on the occasion of the Fourth Congress of Italian Scientists and was designed to serve as a foyer. Its solemn entrance is located in one of the two loggias; the space opens with an honorary staircase ending in a stucco-decorated niche featuring dancing Muses. All rooms revolve around the ballroom dedicated to Gioachino Rossini, a large double-height space compared to the others, with dazzling Empire decoration, all celebrating music. Continuing from the Etruscan vestibule and parallel to it is the Greek room, decorated with a fresco by Giovanni De Min depicting the meeting between Diogenes and Plato. Following is a small circular room, the Roman room, decorated in 1841 by the Belluno native Ippolito Caffi with Roman views: Castel Sant’Angelo, the Roman Forum and that of Augustus, Trajan’s Column, perhaps the most interesting paintings of the entire complex.
To its left is the Renaissance room, with the unfinished ceiling painting by Vincenzo Gazzotto; some of the original furnishings are preserved here; on one side the room opens onto the terrace of the southern façade, on the other it leads to the small Herculaneum room, decorated by Pietro Paoletti with the Triumph of Diana on the ceiling, and on the walls with other episodes related to the myth of the goddess. On the opposite side of the ballroom is the Egyptian room, a tribute to the well-known antiquities discoverer Giovanni Battista Belzoni, with whom Jappelli had personal contacts. The sequence of these rooms aims to eclectically retrace past styles as moments of autonomous aesthetic appreciation in a revival climate.
In 1891 Domenico Cappellato Pedrocchi, the adopted son of the founder Antonio, donated the Café to the Municipality of Padua with the obligation to “preserve the use of the establishment ‘as it is found’ without neglect so that it may maintain its primacy in Italy.”
Information on the Noble Floor of the Pedrocchi Establishment
Piazzetta Pedrocchi,
35100 Padua (Padua)
0498781231
info@caffepedrocchi.it
https://padovacultura.padovanet.it/musei/archivio/cat_sedi_civiche
Source: MIBACT
