Every great cocktail tells a story. At The Court, each one also traces a journey across continents, cultures and techniques before reaching the glass.
The Court, the cocktail bar of Palazzo Manfredi, is often first discovered by travelers searching for a Rooftop bar Rome experience. They return for what happens behind the counter, where bar manager Matteo "Zed" Zamberlan built a reputation that rests as much on what's inside the glass as on the Colosseum outside the windows.
To understand The Court, it helps to understand the bartender who defines it: a Roman by birth, shaped by years spent studying mixology on two different continents before bringing that education home.
Zed spent years working in Rome before a turning point redirected his career. In 2013 he became absorbed by Japanese mixology and trained under Hidetsugu Ueno at High Five, one of Tokyo's most influential cocktail bars, learning a discipline built on precision, ceremony and restraint.
From there his path carried him to New York, where he worked as beverage consultant for the Giorgio Armani Restaurant on Fifth Avenue, absorbing another city's approach to hospitality before eventually returning to Rome to apply everything he had learned abroad.
In 2019 Zed consolidated that expertise into a book, Il Grande Libro dell'Amaro Italiano, an exploration of Italian bitters that also shaped the direction of The Court's own drink list. The result is a bar manager whose cocktails carry the fingerprints of three very different drinking cultures at once.
The Court's signature offering is built around what the team calls a tasting journey: a curated pairing of two cocktails, selected by the bar's mixologists to build a single, guided sensory arc rather than two unrelated drinks.
Guests can follow one of these pre-composed journeys or assemble their own by choosing any two cocktails from the à la carte menu. Either way, the format itself makes a statement: at The Court, a cocktail is treated as a course, meant to be considered alongside the one that comes before or after it, not consumed in isolation.
Behind the bar, the drink list draws on techniques more often associated with a research kitchen than a cocktail counter, including redistillation, fermentation, clarification and fat washing, each used to extract flavor in ways a standard shaker or mixing glass cannot achieve.
Watching Zed's team prepare a drink reveals an approach closer to craftsmanship than routine bartending, where every movement serves a purpose and every ingredient is handled with intention.
The Rising Sun, one of Zed's best known creations, channels his years in Japan directly: aromatic gin, yuzu syrup, matcha and honey, mixed using the tools and gestures of the Japanese tea ceremony and served in a small teapot before being poured into a matcha cup at the table.
Another standout creation, informally known as the transparent Espresso Martini, reworks the classic through redistilled coffee, stripping away color while keeping its intensity intact. The full drink list is renewed roughly every six months, keeping the bar's technique and ingredients in constant motion rather than settling into a fixed repertoire.
Even the cocktails rooted in Rome carry this same inventive streak. The Colosseum Negroni reworks a defining Italian classic through the lens of the city just beyond the terrace, pairing tradition with a distinctly contemporary technique.
Zed has described his approach to mixology as a form of storytelling, and the structure of The Court's menu reflects that directly: cocktails are grouped into thematic sections, each built around a specific narrative or philosophy rather than a spirit category or flavor profile.
That shift in perspective, treating cocktails as stories instead of simple menu items, is what ultimately separates The Court from a bar that simply happens to serve good drinks with a great view.
The Colosseum will always be part of what draws guests to The Court. But behind that panorama is a bar manager whose career spans Tokyo, New York and Rome, a menu structured around guided tasting journeys and a drink list built on techniques borrowed from far beyond the world of classic mixology.
For anyone searching for a Rooftop bar Rome experience worth taking seriously, the case is made in the glass itself. Every cocktail carries the fingerprints of Tokyo, New York and Rome, three drinking cultures distilled into a single glass and served just steps from the Colosseum.
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