Setting of the story
The Sun Also Rises
The book opens here — an apéritif on the Right Bank terrace, watching the evening crowd, the electric signs, and the last horse-cabs go by.
Café Napolitain
Permanently closedThe boulevard terrace where the novel opens — an apéritif on the Right Bank, watching the evening crowd, the electric signs, and the last horse-cabs go by.
- 1 Bd des Capucines (site), 75002 Paris
Artistic reconstruction
The place, briefly
The Napolitain belonged to the other Paris of the novel: not the café Paris of Montparnasse but the working Right Bank of newspapers, theaters, and offices around the Opéra. From the Belle Époque on it was a terrace of journalists, critics, and boulevardiers — the press tribe Jake Barnes belongs to by trade — set on the boulevard des Capucines where the evening promenade passed in review.
The Sun Also Rises opens its Paris here. On a warm spring night Jake sits on the terrace with an apéritif, watching it get dark: the electric signs coming on, the new stop-and-go traffic signal, the crowd, and the horse-cabs still clopping along the edge of the motor traffic — a city changing centuries in a single paragraph. Putting his narrator at the Napolitain rather than the Dôme was a precise piece of sociology; Jake works for a living, and this was the after-work café of his profession.
The Napolitain did not survive as its neighbors across the river did. The café is long gone from the boulevard, its premises absorbed into the commercial frontage of the Opéra quarter, and it persists now mainly in the memoirs of old boulevard journalism — and in the opening pages of the novel, which keep its terrace permanently lit at dusk.
In their words
We went out to the Café Napolitain to have an apéritif and watch the evening crowd on the Boulevard.
It was a warm spring night and I sat at a table on the terrace of the Napolitain after Robert had gone, watching it get dark and the electric signs come on, and the red and green stop-and-go traffic-signal, and the crowd going by, and the horse-cabs clippety-clopping along at the edge of the solid taxi traffic …
Key facts
- A grands-boulevards café of the press and theater world
- Boulevard des Capucines, by the Opéra
- The opening terrace — Jake's after-work apéritif on the Right Bank
- Gone — the boulevard corner remains
In images
Timeline
The boulevard cafés at their height; the Napolitain among the favorites of the newspaper trade.
Jake's Right Bank — offices, press briefings, and an apéritif on the terrace at dusk.
Hemingway opens the Paris chapters of The Sun Also Rises on the Napolitain's terrace.
The café is gone; the corner belongs to the shopfronts of the Opéra quarter.
On the map
Related books
Writers who knew this place
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway wrote about Café Napolitain in The Sun Also Rises.
Within walking distance
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The boulevard music hall where Colette played the title role in La Romanichelle in 1906, during her run as a professional performer.
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Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.