Café Life Rome: A Guidebook to the Cafés and Bars of the Eternal City

by Joe Wolff

The cafe is indisputably central to Roman life. Café Life Rome is the first guide book dedicated solely to the cafés and bars of Rome. Instead of relying on city guides with cursory listings, this book, with its rich photography and informed descriptions, steers travelers through Rome's 5,000 bars to the perfect cafe. Café Life Rome focuses on thirty of the best, in four different areas of the city. Some of these establishments are hundreds of years old and some are relatively young, but each has a story to tell. These cafés also offer food and drink at reasonable prices, or a specialty of the house worth a small splurge. Visitors will be able to choose a comfortable bar close to their accommodations, make it a hangout of their own and watch the Romani at close quarters. It may even be a place where Hemingway or Fellini came to unwind, too.

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2002

Reviews

[Catherine Woodman]

I gave this a reasonable rating because I think if you wanted to hang out in cafes in Rome and people watch, this book would be an excellent guide to that activity--I think you need to be staying in Rome for an extended amount of time for that to be at all practical--like a month. But the book is really more of a conversation about why you would go to particular cafes in Rome--what would bring you there, what has been there before, why you might care about this place or that. Very conversational, and there are definitely people I know who would love this approach.