Coffee for breakfast in Frascati

The Bialetti reminds me of the breakfast in the hills above Rome. I'd stay at this Catholic retreat centre with a view across the valley. A short walk up the hill and I’d be in Frascati, a quaint Italian hillside town. You could walk down narrow cobbled alleys that opened onto small piazzas, flanked by local butchers, a corner home-style restaurant, gellato stands, or fine restaurants. I was there to train some Americans working cross-culturally in that part of Europe. But that didn’t stop me from sampling some of the best gelato around.

Oh yeah… the coffee. On the breakfast table in the dining room was always a fresh carafe of coffee and some fresh bread (Italian of course). Take a sip of that coffee and you’ll realize its more like espresso than coffee brewed in the USA or northern half of the Europe. But it comes by the carafe and is served in 6 oz coffee cups! You can almost imagine a spoon standing up in the coffee – it’s so strong! After a few mornings of that kind of shock to your system, you recognize that this indeed is good coffee, and we are sniveling, weak Americans ;-)

I remember the cult film Bagdad Café where a German lady tastes coffee made in an American diner and spits it out. “Brown water” I think she calls it. The Jack Palance tastes her brew and spits it out as 'poison'. The movie, by the way, is slow moving but endearing if you have the patience for it. Even though it is set in the Nevada desert and the dialogue is mostly in English, it’s a German film. It is classified as a comedy, but is much too subtle to be called such in America.