Evelina Grigorieva

MEETING PLACE

Evelina Grigorieva
A Roman Caffè of Culture. CAFFE GRECO HAS BEEN A GATHERING PLACE FOR ARTISTS AND WRITERS OVER THREE CENTURIES

#2 2020 (67)

The oldest cafe in Rome, the renowned Antico Caffè Greco on the city’s Via Condotti, has been welcoming its distinguished cultural clientele for more than 250 years. Russian cultural figures have been among its most eminent visitors: it was here that Nikolai Gogol worked on “Dead Souls” and here that he met with Karl Bryullov, Alexander Ivanov and others from the established Russian artistic community in Rome of the day. In the 20th century, it entered Soviet art history as a meeting place for masters of the “Severe Style”, memorably depicted in Viktor Ivanov’s 1974 painting “At the Caffè Greco”, in which the artist sits at a table with his contemporaries Gely Korzhev, Pyotr Ossovsky, Ephraim Zverkov and Dmitry Zhilinsky.