Città del Caffè

A Café Travelogue Link 

When I searched "Coffee Town" on Google to create a catchy title for this post, Trieste appeared -- rather than the phrase città del caffè. This suggests that the only error in Susan Van Allen's article on Trieste for BBC Travel is the use of the word "surprising" in the title.

Photo: Michael Brooks via BBC

I try to learn something new about coffee every day, and it is often thanks to students past and present that I do so. On this, the first day of my spring-semester coffee seminar, a former sent me a link to Van Allen's article Trieste: Italy's surprising capital of coffee.

Italy is the only European country to have grown coffee, long ago on the island of Sicily. Trieste is a center for the aspects of coffee for which Italy is better known -- importing, roasting, brewing, and most relevant to this blog: sipping at outdoor cafés. The BBC article provides a lot of insight to all of this, and to the relevance of coffee culture to the broader cultural geography of the city.

The article mentions the importance of the city's location but does not provide a map. To my discredit, I had never looked for Trieste on a map, even though it figures prominently in Black Gold, a coffee movie I have seen dozens of times.

This screenshot from the GeoCafes map highlights a specific café that Van Allen highlights in her article: the Cafè San Marco. It also shows the position of Trieste in the extreme northeast of Italy; the article explains the significance of this location.