Congrats to Wolfgang for starting this thread. I got home from a movie,
saw that 80 posts had suddenly appeared, and assumed it was a flame
war.

|But no! Good strong stuff, with just the right amount of crema.

I've spent much of the past two months in Torre Annunziata, a very,
very rough suburb of Naples which I've been visiting for nearly twenty
years.

Among the things I've noticed in this time are that

- In even the meanest cafe, your espresso cup is kept in hot water
until it's used, so it doesn't cool the coffee.

- At most, a cup of espresso will be served about a quarter full.
That's a quarter in height - much less than a quarter of the volume.

- Italians drink only espresso most of the time - except possibly at
breakfast. You can have a coffee with milk - cappucino or latte - up
till about eleven, but after that it becomes *very* eccentric and,
frankly, anglo-saxon.

- Virtually all Italians, when they make coffee at home, use a plain
Moka stovetop machine.

- Every different big Italian city has its own coffee manufacturer. In
Naples it's Kimbo. In Trieste it's Illy (widely seen as an aristocrat).
I can't remember Rome, Milan, but they each have their own brand -
with, in each case, many different varieties.

- A beautifully made espresso in Italy costs around thirty or forty
cents - one of the reasons why Starbucks don't exist there.

I'm afraid I don't rate American (or English - or of course yeughhhh!
Irish) coffee much. The stuff people normally drink is watery. The
espresso is far, far too thin, and made with no idea of how it's
supposed to be made. There used to be an awful prententious habit in
upmarket places in the US of servin g a bit of lemon with an espresso -
you were supposed to squeeze the lemon rind so the oils would do
something or other to the coffee. But the coffee was so diabolically
bad in the first place that this pompous bit of fluff was farcical.

When I visit America now I alwasys bring with me an ingenious
electronic Moka machine that I bought many years ago at Milan airport.
And a packet of Lavazza.

Lazarus