Cavos (also spelled Kavos; ) is the name of an Italian family of composers, musicians, and architects who settled in the Russian Empire at the end of 18th century. They came of an old, well-to-do Venetian family.

Notable family members

Catterino Cavos also Catarino Camillo Cavos (1775–1840), is one of the most prominent members of the Cavos family. He was the son Alberto Giovanni Cavos, the Primo Ballerino Assuluto of the Fenice Theater and Camilla Baglioni, the Diva of the same opera house in Venice. He became a composer and conductor at the Imperial Theatre in Saint Petersburg. Cavos collaborated with Mikhail Glinka particularly in some of the latter's compositions. In 1836, for example, Cavos conducted Glinka's opera, A Life for the Tsar. This piece, which was about the story of the legendary peasant-hero Ivan Susanin, is particularly important because Cavos himself wrote a composition about the same subject twenty years before. Cavos is also identified as an ancestor of Alexander Tcherepnin from the American composer's maternal side. List of prominent representatives: