Caffè Pedrocchi in Padua has long been known as the “Caffè senza porte” – the café without doors. It was closed the entire time we were in Padua.

In 1772, Francesco Pedrocchi opened a coffee shop next to the university in the center of the city, envisioning a boisterous gathering place where students from all over would drink this strange, novel beverage, coffee, and discuss ideas at all hours. When he died, he passed his little shop on to his son, Antonio, who transformed it into Caffè Pedrocchi, which opened officially in 1831.

Meant to be accessible and affordable to all, the Caffè truly had no doors; the main floor was open to the air. Until 1916, Pedrocchi was a twenty-four-hour establishment. Stendhal, Lord Byron, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Eleonora Duse, George Sand, Dario Fo, and many other bright lights that passed through Padua also passed through the Caffè. 

We came to Italy in January, 1996, through Marco Polo Airport in Venice, on a day dark with rain. Erik and I were friends at Columbia University in New York coming to spend our Junior spring semester at the University of Padua, which is one of the oldest in Europe, founded in 1222. 

Like Pedrocchi at its height, college in New York was a twenty-four-hour affair. We worked until late in the library, and then at some phosphorescent hour we would pass through the college gates onto Broadway and into the open city. We had finished a required class on the Enlightenment before we left for Padua, reading Locke and Kant while imagining ourselves in Pedrocchi living out some European coffeehouse dream. With Italian sun slanting in, we would be surrounded by a flock of students and student-types, junior professors maybe. In effortless Italian we would make vague plans to go to museums and bookstores and open-air markets to buy leather jackets and local fruit, forgetting more English by the day.

We arrived to find Caffè Pedrocchi shut up. Signs outside read lavoro in corso: under construction. This was a common enough occurrence in Italy – there is always some treasure covered in scaffolds. But the Caffè had been closed since the 1980s due to disputes between management and the city of Padua, which was gifted the property in perpetuity by Domenico Cappellato, an adopted son of the Pedrocchi family, in 1891. In 1994, the city began a major renovation to undo upheaval caused by a disastrous re-do after World War II that shuffled the rooms and added a lurid neon-lit fountain inside.

So we never got beyond the four lions – based on the basalt Egyptian lions at Michelangelo’s Campidoglio in Rome – that guarded Pedrocchi’s front porch. Sometimes we would sit by a lion with gelati al limone, wondering where to go during the afternoon when the entire city shut down. Above us on the balustrade were iron griffins: ancient mythical beasts, half-lion, half-eagle.

In 1826, Antonio Pedrocchi engaged the architect Giuseppe Jappelli to design an au courant Neoclassical home for the burgeoning Caffè. Jappelli had to raise the building within the confines of the surrounding irregular Medieval streets. Three enormous piazze are only meters away from Pedrocchi, but remain totally unseen; they burst open at the end of a warren of streets that skitter off obliquely from the Caffè. 

Columbia’s designers, McKim, Mead, and White, built the school's Beaux-Arts campus a few decades later with no such constraints. They could take all the space they needed – from forests and farms, and an insane asylum that had previously claimed the site – to lay out statues, halls, and staircases on the campus’s west side in precise opposition to their doubles on the east. In time, New York’s street grid plan grew up around the campus, on Manhattan’s highest topographical point. At the apex atop a broad set of steps is the campus focal point, a Neoclassical monument, the domed Low Library.

From the front, Pedrocchi appears to be H-shaped, the assumption being that the twin porches at the front of the building would be mirrored in the back. Instead the building tapers to the point of a triangle; in 1839, the“Pedrocchino” pastry shop, a Neo-Gothic addition, squared off that point.

I lived in a Fascist-era apartment building on the edge of the city center, off Piazza Mazzini. The building had an enormous, heavy, metal front door. When I came in at night I would search for a light switch on the terrazzo staircase and race up the four flights to reach my door before the timer went off and I was left in total darkness.

I was a lodger with a woman who worked at an insurance company opposite Pedrocchi. She never left for work before 11. Erik and I called her “the Hot Tamale” because she was stunning. She knew it, too. She was tall and had a perfectly straight, icy-blonde bob.

“Noi nel Veneto siamo tutti chiusi,” the Hot Tamale told me shortly after I arrived. In the Veneto - the region of Italy that contains Padua and Venice - we are all closed off. “Siamo austriaci.” We’re Austrians. Erik and I would come to hear that often over the course of the semester both from locals and people who were passing through, that Northern Italians were cold and distant.

At Pedrocchi, there is a bullet hole in the wall of one of the rooms on the first floor. On February 8, 1848, Austro-Hungarian soldiers fired shots into the Caffè from the street, aiming for student and citizen protesters. No one was killed. It was the “Spring of Nations”– a series of revolutions across Europe that year, large and small, in fervent favor of freedom, democracy, and liberal ideals. On the Italian peninsula, protests began in January in Palermo, in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, with a revolt against the ruling House of Bourbon, and surged north.

The gathered crowd outside Pedrocchi was protesting the conservative external rule of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, which held Padua as part of its demesne the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. The unrest of 1848 formed part of a series of events that eventually led to the Risorgimento, or unification of Italy, in 1861. Until then, the peninsula had not been under one flag since before the fall of Rome, mainly taking the shape of shifting principalities and city-states throughout the Middle Ages. The Veneto joined the new Kingdom of Italy in 1866. 

The bullet hole itself looks like a mussel shell. It is surrounded by a black plaque of a ghostly-looking woman holding a garland over her head. It is lodged in the wall of the Sala Bianca (White Room), which is fashioned in white plaster waves. The street outside – free of cars – is now known as via VIII Febbraio, in recognition of that day when Paduans came together for a free Italy. 

In April of 1996, while we were there, there was a snap general election in Italy. A separatist party called the Lega Nord (the Northern League) gained a stunning majority of votes in the Veneto. Led at the time by the charismatic Umberto Bossi, the Lega Nord seeks to form an independent nation, Padania, by dividing Italy in two at or near the Po Valley, or the Pianura Padana, cleaving ties with everything south of it. In lieu of that, they advocate federalism, which would give the twenty regions of Italy greater control over their own governance and finances, and Rome less. “Veneto Autonomo” was scrawled across walls in Padua and all over the region.

I had a boyfriend in Padua, Matteo, who was a student at the university. He came from a farm in a little village south of the city. His family had lived there for a thousand years, he said. On a Vespa, we would sail through long rows of poppies and sugar beets, red, green, and gold in late-day light.

My mother was born in Calabria, a region in the South, and Erik’s father’s family came from the small Southern region of Molise. Matteo would often make me repeat Calabrese dialect phrases and burst out laughing, then turn around and lecture me, eyes wide, on how Southerners were dragging Italy’s industrial North down and out of a unified Europe. People in the Mezzogiorno – or the "midday," synonymous with the South – people like your people, he said - were lazy by nature, work-shy, and never paid taxes. He said these things to me in low tones, praising Bossi on high, within the locked doors of a Fiat Uno, parked a dark corner of the city, or at the side of a country road somewhere, where canals ran through rice fields, near midnight.

I understood it all, but my Italian wasn’t good enough to form an adequate response, so I kept my mouth shut.

When the Hot Tamale told me that Northerners were closed, I think, she was warning me to rid myself of a notion so common in America: that Italy is a place invariably imbued with warmth, sunlight, and open air, from top to bottom. She was not going to be my mamma, she was saying. There would be no open arms. This was not a homecoming. 

In 1848 when those shots trespassed the café threshold, Italy was still only an idea – and an ideal. In unification, the leaders of the Risorgimento - Garibaldi, Mazzini, Cavour, the men for whom the piazze that surrounded us are named – believed they would compound the potential – and the power - of the people who, with their linked ancient pasts, would become Italians.  Ahead of that time, in 1768, the Corsican revolutionary Pasquale Paoli said, “We are Corsicans by birth and sentiment, but first of all we feel Italian by language, origins, customs, traditions; and Italians are all brothers and united in the face of history and in the face of God.” That year, Corsica was sold by the Republic of Genoa to France as part of the Treaty of Versailles.

“I am Veneto first,” Matteo would say, “and Italian second.”

Since that spring we found ourselves in Padua, the Lega Nord has become an enormous force in Italian politics. In the hands of another charismatic leader, the right-wing Eurosceptic Matteo Salvini, the party is still formally known as the Lega Nord per l’indipendenza della Padania, but in common use has slashed a word from its name and is now just “La Lega,” its sights set on gaining constituents in the South. Salvini has managed to persuade people in regions like Calabria – where he has held an elected position - to unite themselves with the Northern Italians who simultaneously shun them, in order to shut the door against whom they see as common external threats: immigrants, the Roma, Muslims, and asylum-seekers. 

Caffè Pedrocchi reopened to the public in 1998, long after we were gone. I still have never set foot in the Caffè. This summer, Erik was able to finally go to Pedrocchi. In an era of pandemic, people were seated under broad umbrellas outdoors, between the front porches, eating pastries and sandwiches. It was not the student free-for-all it might have been nearly 200 years ago. The clientele were tourists and fancily-dressed locals. 

Erik called me from his table. “It feels like Beverly Hills,” he whispered into the phone. “I’m going to try to go in. I’m not sure it’s allowed,” he said, and hung up.

Over the threshold, the place was nearly haunted. Many of its rooms were closed off. On every open surface was an orchid in a white, orb-like bowl. The main floor rooms were en filade as they always were, one framing a view of the next – but looking through the Caffè out the other side, there was far more life out on the street on than inside. Erik returned to his table, had a solitary coffee, and walked back out into the square.