ErN 44,
entry Dec. 2003
Real Coffee &
Gambrinus
In Billy Wilder's delightful 1972 film, Avanti!,
Jack Lemmon's character, Wendell Armbruster, an
obnoxious American industrialist, insults
Neapolitan coffee by saying that he had tried
the local mud baths earlier that morning: "They
called it espresso."
Hah-hah,
say Neapolitans. Naples prides itself on coffee —nay,
knows itself to be the sole arbiter of what sets a
magnificent brew apart from the swill they serve in the
rest of the world. Naples even has its own special
Neapolitan coffee percolator, a three-piece contraption
that requires three-ring dexterity to turn upside down (or
maybe it's rightside up) at just the right moment during
the brewing process.
For such a city, Naples was tardy —the late 1700s— in
coming to the idea that one could actually set up little
coffee bars along the by–ways and maybe serve some sweets
and pastries in the process. Such places were common in
the rest of Italy in the late 1600s. Yet, the Neapolitans
made up for lost time; by the mid–1800s there was scarcely
a short stretch of street in Naples without a little
coffee bar of some sort. That tradition continues to this
day. Some are holes in the wall, and some are opulent.
Indeed, calling the Caffè
Gambrinus a coffee bar is like calling St.
Peter's a church; you're right, but the crime of paucity
of description borders on a capital offense.
The Caffè Gambrinus
(photo insert, above) is on the ground floor of the large
building that houses the Naples Prefecture at Piazza Plebiscito.
One entrance is on that large square, itself; the main
entrance is on Piazza
Trieste e Trento (still known to many as Piazza San Ferdinando,
named for the church on that square). Gambrinus is a few
yards away from the Royal Palace,
the San Carlo opera house, and
the Galleria Umberto. It is at
the beginning of two of the most famous streets in Naples:
via Toledo (also
known as via Roma)
and via Chiaia,
the main street that joined the downtown area of 1900 to
the western part of the city. Gambrinus, thus, was the
crossroads where music, art, and politics came together in
the late 1800s to sit together and have a coffee and maybe
a brandy or two. In other words, a watering-hole for
intellectuals.
Gambrinus was born as, simply, il Gran Caffè on its
current premises in the 1860s. By the 1890s, with the
great rebuilding of Naples, the risanamento, in
full swing, it turned into the Caffè Gambrinus, using the name of the
"patron saint of beer," that name deriving, according to
one plausible etymology, from Jan Primus (John I), a
13th–century Burgundy prince. Thus, Gambrinus, like other
establishments of its kind was and remains a place where
you do more than just drink coffee.
The premises consist of a main bar and pastry section plus
six adjoining rooms, all of which are showcases of fin de siècle
fashion, that 1890s wave of sophistication and
world-weariness. The rooms are all vaulted and display in
white bas relief various scenes from mythology. The walls
are lined with thin, classical columns and reliefs of
statuary, and there is ample use of large mirrors to
increase light and the illusion of space. The mirrors
alternate with equally large paintings of outdoor
Neapolitan life of the day, not precisely tromp l'oeil, but at
least creating the pleasant sensation that you are looking
out at the bay of Naples, a coast-line, fishermen,
fashionably overdressed women strolling along the street,
and even one of the ultimate in 1890s decadence —a woman
smoking a cigarette! Neapolitan decadence of the 1890s is
round and plump, not to be confused with the gaunt English
decadence of the same period; all the women in these
paintings, especially the smiling peasants, have 40 pounds
on anything Aubrey Beardsley ever came up with.
Gambrinus was closed in 1938 under the flimsy
pretext that the noise was keeping the prefect and his
wife, who lived in the same building upstairs, awake at
night. In reality, all those artists, politicians, and
writers had created their own little hotbed of discussion,
the noise from which was keeping Fascist government
officials awake on the eve of WW2. The establishment
reopened in the 1950s.
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