Babington's Tea Rooms

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.