Watching them, it seems like they’re constantly suggesting coffee for one reason or another or inviting each other to grab a cup—which results in multiple cups a day. Pretty surprising considering how strong espresso is, and how much caffeine is in it.
By the way—if you order a ristretto instead of an espresso, you’ll get a drink that’s even smaller, made from extracting just the first bit of coffee from the beans. I hear that the caffeine and acidity are lower than in an espresso, too. Adding milk to it yields a mellow café latte or cappuccino.
Coffee first came to Italy via Venice, which is still the home of the oldest coffee house in continuous operation in the country—the lovely Caffè Florian. The fact that it looks out onto the Piazza San Marco in the center of the city makes it even more special. It was originally established under the name Alla Venezia Trionfante, or “Venice the Triumphant.”
The Italians fell in love with the taste of coffee, so you’d think it would have spread like wildfire. But this was not the case. Its stimulating properties made church officials suspicious—even fearful—of this strange, perhaps devilish beverage, so they prohibited it. The pope tested coffee in secret to get to the bottom of things, concluded that there was nothing evil about it, and lifted the ban. Coffee culture then spread rapidly throughout Italy.
If you’ve ever been to Italy, you’ve probably visited a bar. The spelling is the same as the English word that the Japanese associate with a wine bar or other drinking establishment with a bartender, but the origin of the Italian word bar is actually unclear. Even the Italians, who use the word all the time, aren’t sure where it comes from.
Some say that it may come from words like sbarra or barriera, which refer to fences or poles used to section off a road or area. In any case, they didn’t end up being called “coffee shops” or “cafeterias” or anything like that. The name that caught on was “bars”. When I looked it up, I discovered that the Italian entrepreneur Allesandro Manaresi opened the first-ever bar in Florence, putting together the first letters of the phrase banco a ristoro.
Banco a ristoro translates as “snack counter.” Italian bars certainly serve sandwiches and other light fare, and since some serve coffee during the day and aperitifs or other alcoholic beverages at night, they carry both the meaning of the English “bar” and the Italian acronym. That may be one reason that the word “bar,” rather than “cafeteria,” was the one that caught on in Italy.
The fact that you can drop in for a coffee, or occasionally get some encouragement from a kind bartender, or meet up with friends, or just read the paper makes the bar something that the Italians can’t live without.
