A young Roman and two women sit at a cluttered osteria table and stare straight out at us, knives and forks at the ready, while a tabby cat waits at lower left. Carl Bloch painted it in 1866, and it became one of his most popular genre paintings. The merchant Moritz G. Melchior commissioned it, and he appears among the men at the back table, together with Bloch himself.

The scene is an intensified version of Wilhelm Marstrand's Italian osteria picture of 1848. The SMK notes the contrast between the Italians' messy table, with its crumbs and flies, and the pale-skinned men in gray suits at the clean table behind, a 19th-century view of “exotic” southern Europeans. It is in the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) in Copenhagen.