Historic & Literary Cafés — Part X, Satellite Houses

Not one of these houses is remembered for coffee. They are remembered for who was let in, what was invented to satisfy a rule, what the windows looked out on, and which side they were on.

The room itself was invented at Le Procope in 1686, where Procopio Cutò installed the chandeliers, the mirrors and the marble tables that every European café has had since. But the original closed in 1872 and did not trade as a café again until the 1920s: Procope is the oldest by founding, Florian the oldest by continuity, and the two claims are not the same.

The most consequential decision in this chapter was made twice, by two houses, forty years apart: Florian in 1720 and Antico Caffè Greco in 1760 admitted women when no other coffee house in their cities did. That is why Casanova appears in both stories. Al Bicerin’s drink exists because worshippers left the Consolata having fasted before communion; Caffè San Marco opened in Austrian Trieste in January 1914 as an instrument of Italian irredentism; Les Deux Magots and A Brasileira were a draper and a coffee wholesaler before either was a café.

And the commercial mechanism is shared and unstated: a counter price and a seated price several times higher. The historic café sells the chair, and what the chair looks out on.