A traditional English Tea Room by the Spanish Steps in Rome, Italy!
How did it get there? … It is a story to be shared over a cup of tea and slice of cake…
Two Victorian ladies, Isabel Cargill and Anna Maria Babington, having taken the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe, found on their return to England that they had left their heart in Rome. So, in 1893, they had the singular and eccentric idea to go back and open an English Tea Room. Singular because, at the time, no one in Italy drank tea (it was only taken as medicine!) and eccentric because these two entrepreneurial women had no previous business experience and only £100 in their pockets.
Over 125 years of continuous business since, it can be counted as a success! Its doors still open, its unmistakably English sign outside, despite two World Wars and the rise of Mussolini!
Incidentally, on the other side of the Piazza, is the ‘Keats – Shelley Memorial House’, a writer’s house museum where you can stand in the very room where the English poet John Keats died. And so, framing these foreign steps, these two quintessentially English ‘Rooms’ provide a snapshot of the long history, literary and social, of the English abroad.
