ORBISGOURMET & PANTRY IN ROME 9 shops in the atlas.Illustration
Gourmet & Pantry in Rome
9 stores · curated ORBIS register
Castroni combines coffee roasting with pantry goods, continuing a Rome food business established in 1932. Ladurée adds macarons and boxed confectionery to the selection, drawing on the Paris house's pastry and tea-room history. Salumeria Roscioli combines house-cured guanciale with a broad cheese selection, giving shoppers another approach to choosing food for home.
Babington's Tea Rooms opened on December 4, 1893, at Via Due Macelli 66 near Piazza di Spagna in Rome, founded by two young women, Anna Maria Babington and Isabel Cargill — granddaughter of Captain William Cargill, founder of Dunedin, New Zealand — who invested 100 pounds of their own savings into a tea and reading room for Rome's Anglo-Saxon community.
Best for Hand-blended tea served in a Piazza di Spagna tea room
Babington's Tea Rooms opened on December 4, 1893, at Via Due Macelli 66 near Piazza di Spagna in Rome, founded by two young women, Anna Maria Babington and Isabel Cargill — granddaughter of Captain William Cargill, founder of Dunedin, New Zealand — who invested 100 pounds of their own savings into a tea and reading room for Rome's Anglo-Saxon community. It was a genuine risk at the time: in 1890s Italy, tea was sold mainly in pharmacies, not in shops built to serve and drink it.
The business survived where the risk might have suggested otherwise, staying open through Mussolini's anti-English climate and the Second World War with its English-language sign intact in solid bronze on a Roman travertine plaque. It is now run by a fourth generation of the founding families, still hand-blending teas with no artificial flavoring, and in 2018 launched the Babingtons Foundation, funding education in Darjeeling — tying the shop's supply chain back to the region much of its tea still comes from.
For a Roman institution founded by an Englishwoman and a New Zealander, Babington's own description still holds: not entirely British, not precisely Italian, but Babingtons.
Rome's gourmet institution since 1932 — roastery, pantry, and the shelves every Roman raids for gifts.
Best for Roastery, pantry, and the shelves every Roman raids for gifts
Castroni traces its own history to 1932 in Rome, and the company still frames its identity around the city specifically — the site's language is 'l'amore per Roma,' love for Rome, rather than a generic import-shop pitch. It now operates thirteen stores across the capital, each stocking a mix of house-roasted coffee (roasted at its own Torrefazione Augusta facility in Pomezia, just outside the city) alongside imported goods: wines, oils, tea, liqueurs, confectionery, and ethnic grocery items sourced internationally. The coffee itself draws on beans from Central America, Indonesia, and Africa, positioning Castroni less as a single-origin specialist and more as a general-purpose Roman pantry with a roastery attached — the kind of shop locals use for both an espresso fix and a gift hamper before a holiday. Online ordering and compatible capsule formats extend that same catalog beyond the physical stores. What distinguishes Castroni from Rome's other historic coffee names is this range: it isn't only a café or only a roaster, but a working grocery institution that happens to roast its own coffee, built on ninety-plus years of continuous operation in one city.
Founded in 1900. Giolitti has been serving exceptional gelato to Romans and visitors for over 120 years. The hazelnut, pistachio, and stracciatella are the classics, but the seasonal fruit flavors are equally good. The whipped cream (panna) on top is always free.
The Parisian macaron maison since 1862 — pastel towers, double-decker macarons and salon-de-thé romance. Pierre Desfontaines, Louis-Ernest Ladurée's second cousin, joined two macaron shells with a filling; Jeanne Souchard (Ernest's wife) is credited with creating one of the first Paris tea rooms at Rue Royale.
Best for Pastel macaron boxes.
Ladurée began as a Parisian bakery in 1862, and its tea salon on Rue Royale — with ceiling cherubs painted by Jules Chéret — helped establish the salon de thé as an institution where women could meet unaccompanied. The house's claim on posterity is the double-decker macaron: two almond-meringue shells joined with ganache, an assembly Ladurée popularized in the twentieth century and turned into the pastel-boxed emblem of Parisian sweetness worldwide. The Rome address on Via Borgognona delivers the full ritual — the mint-green livery, the pyramid of shells in rotating seasonal flavors, the pastries beyond macarons that reward attention: the Ispahan's rose-lychee-raspberry combination has entered the pastry canon. Buy macarons to carry, but sit if there is time; the salon experience, unhurried and slightly theatrical, is the original product.
Macarons travel poorly beyond a day; buy the last morning, and choose the seasonal flavors over the permanent ones — the pastry kitchen's invention shows there.
Gianni and Alina Dasso opened this fresh-pasta shop on Via Roma in February 1986, hand-filling ravioli and pansotti with recipes drawn from family pasta makers already working the Ligurian coast. The lab still turns out egg pasta by hand alongside pesto and walnut sauce, and now supplies Eataly branches in Genoa, Turin, and Munich.
Best for Handmade ravioli, pansotti, and Ligurian sauces
Piera and Bartolomeo Costanza run this family operation putting up tuna fillets, mackerel, swordfish and bottarga preserved in olive oil alone, with no added dyes or preservatives, out of their own licensed canning facility on the island. Their shop on Via Roma sells the jarred conserve alongside fresh catch, the same fish worked from harbor to jar without leaving Lampedusa.
Best for Tuna, swordfish and bottarga preserved in olive oil
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