Casina Valadier is located in the green lung of the Capital, Villa Borghese on the Pincian Hill, the ancient Collis Hortulorum. In the past, this is where the great Roman families owned the largest and most sumptuous gardens in the city.
It was built between 1816 and 1837 by Giuseppe Valadier, a famous Roman architect and urban planner, who reworked in neoclassical style the previous Casino della Rota, a seventeenth-century building built in turn on the remains of an ancient Roman cistern. From the beginning, the Casina was designed and built to be used as a meeting place, in the manner of French bistros. After the First World War, the Casina became the most fashionable place in Rome, a meeting place for artists, intellectuals and politicians from all over the world, including Gandhi, King Farouk, Strauss and Pirandello.
Throughout the 1920s, it continued to be a popular destination for celebrities, tourists and politicians, entering the history of Roman café-restaurants. After the war, for more than thirty years, the villa experienced great prosperity, which persists to this day.