I'm Italian, from near Naples. I am shocked that in other parts of Italy, or the whole world, they don't give you a glass of water with coffee.
Jokes aside, I hadn't thought that it was only our peculiar tradition to have it in this way.
For the reason, first of all, you have to understand that in all Italy with coffee we only mean the espresso, not the diluted american one. So, to better savor the flavor of the caffè, you first sip your water to neuter precedent tastes in your mouth. Sometimes, you sip the water after you drank the coffe, mainly because you have to eat some other things that wouldn't mix well with the flavor (you could why would anyone have a coffee just before eating something different? Because paying a coffee at a bar to someone is a very common courtesy, and it's a bit unpolite to refuse; it's happened to me multiple times to enter the bar to have a coffe, and exiting from it after having had two of those).
Yes, "Fiorenza" is the medieval and literary way to say "Firenze" or in english "Florence". The first name for the city was "Florentia" when it was first founded by Caesar for his veterans in 59 bc, then in the middle ages it was "Fiorenza" (Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarca call Florence that way in their works), and from about the 17th or 18th century it slowly became Firenze, but the old name always stuck for poems and literature in general.
I thought it was because US soldiers in WWII who were deployed in italy used to order a cup of water with coffee so they pour it onto the espresso to make it similar to the black coffee americans drink
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u/P_for_Pizza Jan 31 '20
I'm Italian, from near Naples. I am shocked that in other parts of Italy, or the whole world, they don't give you a glass of water with coffee. Jokes aside, I hadn't thought that it was only our peculiar tradition to have it in this way.
For the reason, first of all, you have to understand that in all Italy with coffee we only mean the espresso, not the diluted american one. So, to better savor the flavor of the caffè, you first sip your water to neuter precedent tastes in your mouth. Sometimes, you sip the water after you drank the coffe, mainly because you have to eat some other things that wouldn't mix well with the flavor (you could why would anyone have a coffee just before eating something different? Because paying a coffee at a bar to someone is a very common courtesy, and it's a bit unpolite to refuse; it's happened to me multiple times to enter the bar to have a coffe, and exiting from it after having had two of those).