The Light In the Piazza
Cont (Page 2 of 2)
"In the U.S. coffee is merely a hot beverage, not an elixir," notes Andrea Illy, the head of the 72-year-old Illycaffe company, which is based in Trieste.
Illy is drawing up plans to open hundreds of bars, called Espressamente, in Europe and Asia. France--so near to Italy, but so far in terms of espresso quality and bar culture--is Illy’s major target. They have hired minimalist architect, Claudio Silverstrin, who has built stores for Giorgio Armani, to design the shops.
“I am sure the Illy product has potential to be good,” says Marzovilla. “But it’s hard to run a business like this on a mass scale, and you can’t be sure this will work, because they are trying to create an artificial environment. And how to you train hundreds of people in different countries to make an espresso? How do you make a minimalist modern store feel comfortable? It’s going to be hard to do.”
“You have to remember that bars in Italy are family-run businesses,” says Dimitri Pauli, a native of Milan. “One of the toughest things about operating an Italian bar in Manhattan, is that you can not easily remove the bar from piazza. In Italy when you go to your bar, you are, in a way, going home. An Italian thinks of the bar he goes to as ‘my bar.’ This is an almost obsolete idea in the U.S., where things become more impersonal all the time.”
Guaducci and Pauli also site a basic economic factor that makes it hard for mom and pop businesses such as bars to thrive outside of Italy. “In Italian cities you can still get away with low ticket exchanges,” Guarducci says. “Hundreds of 1.50 euro espresso charges will get you through in Naples, Milan and Rome. Not in New York City or London.” (A cappuccino at Sant Ambroeus in New York is triple the price of one at Sant Ambroeus in Milan.)
“It’s uphill battle, running this business in New York,” Guarducci adds. “Our customers in New York want stools at the bar, for example. We actually have people ask us why we don’t have bar stools.” Americans don’t want to stand and take their coffee. Sant Ambroeus in New York compromised, and put stools in after 6 o’clock. But they take them away in the daytime.
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A scene from the Via Scarlatti in Naples in early January. The well-known bar Mexico does a very brisk afternoon business. Three Carabineieri stand near the door. A waiter leaves the bar, holding a tray with several espressi covered by a plastic dome. His destination: an office across the street. Next door: A typical fruteria; a colorful display of produce spilling on to the sidewalk. In the middle of the shop, four young men sit at a card table, eating lunch. Next to the fruteria, a shop called The Digital Universe, which has gone out of business. The three store fronts--two thriving, one defunct--tell a tale about a culture. In many other countries, it would have been the bar and the fruiteria that had closed, and the computer store that thrived. Anyone who has had a tomato or an orange in Italy knows that the most basic pleasures are very much within reach to the Italian public. Anyone who regularly makes international calls from Italy knows the country has an ambivalent relationship with technology.
A fourth store on this block of Via Scarlatti tells another part of the story: A bar that has been remodeled in a minimalist
fashion, stripped of its charm. White walls, modern furniture. No customers.
“Well, you know why?” says Dimitri Pauli, “Because there is a kind of identity crisis in Italy, and it is reflected in this bar.”
“It can be difficult to live with so much history,” Pauli adds. “It’s an Italian burden, which leads to a temptation to find what is new—reject what seems like a musty, tradition-bound past. A new generation is trying to work through this. You have these antique buildings in Italy. They are where you have lived all your life, and a bar like Cova in Milan, or Mexico, the old places, they kind of blended in, and they have survived in a country where tradition has remained very vital.”
When Guarducci and Pauli remodeled Sant Ambroeus, they had disputes about how far to stray from the 50-era décor of the original, which looked like it had been airlifted from Milan.
“The temptation is to reject what you know, and grab on to what looks like it is a step forward,” says Guarducci, who admits he had a aversion to the yellow-tinted mirrors and traditional chandeliers of the original interior. “And it's completely wrong. I mean, there are bars now in Italy where you go in, and you feel like you're like in a Richard Meier waiting room or something. They will not probably not survive. I feel strongly that you have to have some continuity with the street, so you have to be very careful when you update and now throw out what works and makes people comfortable in an effort to shake off the past.”
As Severnini points out in his ode to the piazza in La Bella Figura, the square can not be overly planned or faked by modern architects. It must evolve organically in order to be an effective urban space. A piazza is often a happy accident of history—a juxtaposition of old buildings and byways that have left an open space where life then organizes itself. The Roman Forum itself developed in this way, according to archeologists.
The same applies to the bar. Many started life as a latteria or a grocery 100 years ago. The blossoming of tourism in Italy after the Second World War may have inspired their owners to turn them into cafés and bars--concept which has become another in a long line of Italian classics.
“You have to be careful when you start fiddling with traditions,” says Guarducci. “Starbucks which imitated the Italian bar—and very poorly--has not yet dared to cross over into Italy,” he says. “The Italian coffee companies are planning to head Starbucks off and open concept bars that mimic Starbucks. So Italians have to be careful” that the local bar does not lose out to the corporate invaders. And Italian bar mimicking a Starbucks would be an Italian bar imitating an imitation of an Italian bar. A sad state of affairs.
“Italian bar traditions cannot change,” says Guarducci. “If we ever change that, we will become a Disneyland nation, and we will lose.”
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