A Cup of Joe / Una Tazza di Giuseppe

On Tuesday mornings, I have a standing coffee date with a friend. We have a few favorite places and enjoy just sitting, sipping, and chatting about life for an hour or more. It's a routine that probably wouldn't work very well in Italy.

If you've ever stood at an Italian coffee bar on any given morning, you know that coffee there is nothing like coffee here.  For starters, there's the size difference. Those wee little cups of espresso hardly seem worth going to the trouble of interrupting your morning commute. Forget about parking in some cozy booth with your laptop for hours on end. One or two swallows and the coffee is gone!

Once, I watched a barrista in Rome prepare six or seven of those little cups, cover them with plastic lids, put them on a tray and leave the coffee bar in a hurry.  Intrigued, I asked where he was rushing to and learned he was delivering a to-go order for a nearby business meeting! Seriously? It would take longer for them to call in the order than to drink it when it arrived.

And then there's the obvious taste difference.  Drinking that small somewhat bitter espresso is an acquired taste and one that is often not acquired by Americans who are used to topping off a tall mug of coffee with half and half and their favorite sweetener. Although I have gotten accustomed to espresso after a meal, I prefer to start mornings in Italy with cappuccino. The standard breakfast of cornetto and cappuccino is a far cry from what you will find on any restaurant menu in the U.S., but when in Rome...

Needless to say, it's no surprise that Pier Giorgio Frassati was a coffee drinker. "He often had coffee with me," noted his friend Francesco Massetti. I'm sure quite a few of his friends could make the same claim. Like many university students, Pier Giorgio relied on caffeine to prepare for exams. In a letter to his best friend just a few months before his death, he wrote, "I had to drink huge doses of coffee so that I could study." During Lent, he kept a strict fast.  According to his mother, "for breakfast, he would have black coffee with a bit of chocolate."

While away in Germany, Pier Giorgio wrote to his mother to relieve her concerns about whether he was getting enough to eat. (Isn't that just like the classic Italian mother?!) His daily routine included what he described as "characteristic German coffee."

Now, dear mama, I’ll tell you what I am eating and how many times. I have breakfast at 7 in the morning; bread, coffee, milk, butter and marmalade, then at 10 bread and salami or something; at one we eat and there’s always a soup, a plate of meat, vegetables and the usual potatoes and then almost always some dessert. At four in the afternoon coffee the same as at midday. So, you see, dear mama, that I am very well."

One of the answers most often given when people are asked why they love Blessed Frassati is that he is so relatable. His life was ordinary and he had to deal with many of the same things we have to deal with in the usual course of a day. Coffee is such a little thing. But knowing that it was a part of his daily routine makes my Tuesday morning coffee times even more special. It's comforting to know that the path to holiness doesn't require a detour around the coffee shop. If only the rest of the journey was as easy as sipping a cup of joe!

Verso l'alto!  ///cmw