I live in a place where the coffee is so good that sometimes, when you put the cup on the saucer, what comes from the heart is not to leave the bar but to start applauding. Informing you that the coffee in Italy is good is on par, in terms of revealing secrets, with telling you that Venice is a wonder, Florence is the only place to go and that, if you go to Rome, you should not miss seeing a certain hermitage called Vatican. Having assumed this guilt, however, I must resort to justify myself to the mixture of stupidity and authority that comes from having tasted the coffee from the Galapagos and Nepal, from Saint Lucia and the Canary Islands and even from the eventful island of Saint Helena. In the end, I have come to be grateful that there is no coffee on Mars. I also speak to you as a convert: for years and years I have campaigned in filter coffee, in coffee that looks like tea, in kettles with complicated Japanese brands and scales capable of measuring the weight of a uranium proton. All this, of course, I have kept in the utmost secrecy, as if instead of buying coffee I was dedicated to selling heroin: we can tolerate being considered a street poet, an Instagram philosopher or a specialist in lifestyle, but looking like one of those modern people who gentrify neighborhoods with their spelled bread and their Ethiopian Yirgacheffe would already be an excessively cruel human destiny. We still drink that filter coffee at home: we like it for its delicacy, which is why experts and repipis call it airy and floral notes; even by a color that reveals, in eighteenth-century style, a Chinese or pastoral scene at the bottom of the cup. But now there is no morning in Rome that I don’t wake up with the joy of knowing that a coffee awaits me—a espresso— like the momentary embrace of God.
Oh yes, Italy is the country of institutional cafes, and it’s good to have spent enough time to distinguish the color of the jackets—white or cream—of Florian and Quadri’s waiters back in Venice. In Rome there is El Greco, whose prices would make Rockefeller hesitate. From these literary cafés, as has been written, one went straight to prison or to Parliament. But Italian coffee is office worker coffee. Here they call it a “bar”, despite the fact that no one – Italy is a moderate country – has ever had a drink there: it’s not like a bottle of Mandarin Punch is very tempting. It has a metal bar. Service of somewhat harsh sympathies. Coffee machines like the V12 of a Lamborghini. Professionals drink coffee at the bar, but those of us who travel around the world as tourists from Wichita can drink it on the terrace: it is less than two minutes of moral reflection, in which life and the world square again, good humor He gathers his troops and, with any luck, a sparrow nibbles at the bun crumbs on the other table. Let no one ask here specialty coffee: Italy remains a kingdom when it comes to coffee roasters, an opaque guild with ancestral secrets. That explains why it is always good, but also why—things of irregularity—it is only sometimes sublime. On the other hand, reaching this harmony of the spheres – creaminess, density, smell, temperature – is of such infinitesimal sophistication that a single false step destroys it: a little more or less water, a grind that is too fine or not at all. too thick, and goodbye.
We watch our wine, we split pears with tobacco, and a bad afternoon with carbohydrates can plunge us into a moral crisis, but the last thing the mercy of doctors is going to take away from us is coffee. Even as all happiness has its substitute, it can also be taken decaffeinated—a cardinal sin. Orwell dedicated long pages to imagining in England the pub perfect: in Italy, the perfect coffee, luckily, does not have to be imagined. Pilgrim through the country, I have not found any better than the Bar del Corso in L’Aquila, but in Rome one can go to Natalizi or Strabbioni, where you will be the only foreigner in the place, or go down to Naples to that chair that is Il Professore . As an expatriate Spaniard, one sometimes wonders if it wouldn’t be more worthwhile for us to have poor garbage collection in order to generalize good coffee: in so much tension, in so much polarization, in so much bad mood, our attachment to coffee must have some fault uncertain. If we want Spain to stop hurting us, let’s start by leaving behind the heartburn caused by roasting.
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