Coffee is one of the most popular beverages in the world, if not the most popular in absolute.
I read somewhere that more than 400 billion cups are consumed each year.
Obviously it’s always wrong to generalize and all what is known under the name of coffee in not necessarily similar.
Let’s think of Italian espresso, of Austrian Einspänner, of huge and light American coffee, Turkish coffee not filtered and even of the abominable instant coffee (for a too long time I had felt slightly guilty for that, thinking that it was a Swiss creation – Nescafé by Nestlé – but recently I have found out that instant coffee had been invented in 1901 by Satori Kato, a Japanese scientist working in Chicago, while the Swiss had only the responsibility for spreading it all over the world on industrial scale).
I cannot conceive to start a brand new day without at least one cup of real coffee. It makes me feel well, positive, it gives me good mood...
It happens to me to think of something apparently very frivolous, but maybe with a number of much deeper implications...
Socrates and Plato and all the other Ancient Greek philosophers never tasted coffee. Neither did Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, François Villon...
Coffee was introduced in Europe by Italian traders only at the beginning of 17th century, and, as it often happens, judged suspicious by the Church.
But the Pope decided to taste it anyway and he found it so delicious, that he recurred to a diplomatic compromise; he “blessed” and “baptized” coffee, so it stopped being a “devilish” beverage.
The first European coffee shop was opened in Venice and was called “La Bottega del Caffé”, it was more or less the holy year 1647, a little later the second coffee shop of the western world was opened in England and the success was enormous.
100 years later only in Venice the coffee shops were already more than 2000.
I’ll stop here my wordy story, because I don’t want to get my own cup of coffee cold.