In later days, the Caffe Florian was under the superintendence of a female chef, and the waitresses used, in the case of certain visitors, to fasten a flower in the button-hole, perhaps allusively to the name. In the Piazza itself girls would do the same thing. A good deal of hospitality is, and has ever been, dispensed at Venice in the cafes and restaurants, which do service for the domestic hearth. There were many other establishments devoted, more especially in the latest period of Venetian independence, to the requirements of those who desired such resorts for purposes of conversation and gossip. These houses were frequented by various classes of patrons--the patrician, the politician, the soldier, the artist, the old and the young--all had their special haunts where the company and the tariff were in accordance with the guests. The upper circles of male society--all above the actually poor--gravitated hither to a man. For the Venetian of all ranks the coffee house was almost the last place visited on departure from the city, and the first visited on his return. His domicile was the residence of his wife and the repository of his possessions; but only on exceptional occasions was it the scene of domestic hospitality, and rare were the instances when the husband and wife might be seen abroad together, and when the former would invite the lady to enter a cafe or a confectioner's shop to partake of an ice. [Illustration: FLORIAN'S FAMOUS CAFFE IN THE PIAZZA DI SAN MARCO, VENICE, NINETEENTH CENTURY] The Caffe Florian has undergone many changes, but it still survives as one of the favorite _caffe_ in the Piazza San Marco. By 1775 coffee-house history had begun to repeat itself in Venice. Charges of immorality, vice, and corruption, were preferred against the _caffe_; and the Council of Ten in 1775, and again in 1776, directed the Inquisitors of State to eradicate these "social cankers." However, they survived all attempts of the reformers to suppress them. The Caffe Pedrocchi in Padua was another of the early Italian coffee houses that became famous. Antonio Pedrocchi (1776-1852) was a lemonade-vender who, in the hope of attracting the gay youth, the students of his time, bought an old house with the idea of converting the ground floor into a series of attractive rooms. He put all his ready money and all he could borrow into the venture, only to find there were no cellars, indispensable for making ices and beverages on the premises, and that the walls and floors were so old that they crumbled when repairs were started.