Cafes, bars, cool locations to wander about in
• Sant Eustachio Il Caffe, Piazza Sant Eustachio 82, 00186 Roma. This
“caffe” is located in a small piazza with as many as three or four coffee
places, so you just have to sniff the aroma to find the piazza - the equivalent
of having a nice cappuccino before you drink one. Sant Eustachio is the
favourite place of the staff from the Italian Senate who work almost next
door at Palazzo Madama and if you are into “fossilised” political networking or
need a “ricommendazione”, it is definitely the place to go and taste a
wonderful coffee and stock up on “chicchi di cafe” while you touch elbows
with the politicos.
• Piazza Navona, which has some of the best design stores in Rome, close to
the chuch of St. Luigi dei Francesi, which has two really wonderful
Caravaggio paintings that will leave you completely breathless and ready to
go back round the corner to Sant Eustachio for another coffee.
Other than those, Rome is absolutely a hangers-out paradise, since every corner yields up new marvels of architecture, design, and atmosphere, and you can get a great coffee every 200 metres (just like in Barcelona!).