Babae
A restaurant on Via di Santo Spirito with a working wine window, which for one hour each evening hands glasses of wine through a hatch in the wall to whoever rings the bell.
- Area
- Santo Spirito
- Address
- Via di Santo Spirito 21r
- Wine window
- Roughly one hour each evening
- Closed
- Mondays
- Checked
- August 2026
- Price
- €€
- Go for
- Ringing a bell in a palace wall and being handed a glass of wine through it. Only a handful of these are still working.
- Skip if
- You want the window and arrive outside the evening hour, or you dislike drinking standing on a pavement.
What everybody agrees on
Read across public reviews on Google, TripAdvisor and Yelp, plus local writing about the buchette del vino, in September 2026.
- Nearly all
The window is the reason to come. Ring, order, and drink standing in the street, which is how it worked four hundred years ago.
- Most
It is a short stop rather than an evening. Twenty minutes, a queue forms, and people move on.
- Often
The inside is a small dining room full of plants and gets photographed constantly.
- Often
House red by the glass is cheap and perfectly good. Nobody comes for a wine list.
- Some
The crowd skews young and international, largely art and design students.
- A few
Arriving outside the window hour and finding it shut is the most common disappointment.
What to order
A glass of the house red through the window, standing outside. If you want to eat, the crostoni are what people mention, and you should sit down for that rather than treat it as an add-on.
Before you go
- The window hour
- Early evening, roughly seven to eight. Check the day you go, it moves.
- Getting there
- Five minutes west of Ponte Vecchio along the south bank.
- Closed
- Mondays.
- Booking
- For a table inside, yes. The window needs no booking, only a bell.
- Nearby
- Two minutes from Piazza Santo Spirito if the queue is long.
The wine windows were cut into palace walls in the seventeenth century so wine could be sold without contact. Almost all of them were sealed. Babae reopened theirs and now runs an evening hour when you ring, order and drink standing in the street. Inside is a small dining room full of plants. The window is the reason people come, and it draws a queue, so it is more of a twenty minute stop than an evening.