Although Italy boasts some of the best HOT coffee the world has to offer, they have yet to tackle the world of ICED coffee. The summers in Italy, especially Florence, can be brutally hot so you would imagine the idea of adding ice to coffee would have hit home here, but it has not.
Now, there is a perfectly good explanation for this. First, Italians really don’t put ice in anything, let alone coffee. Coffee for them should be super strong and not diluted in any way. They also, as I mentioned in a previous post on coffee, do not tend to drink lattes or cappuccinos as often as Americans do and these are really the coffee drinks that lend themselves best to being iced. The vast majority of Italian coffee breaks are spent drinking espresso shots that would be quite silly on ice. Finally, ice and other very cold drinks are, in general, not thought of “healthy” in Italy. This is especially true of ice-cold milk.
I am not saying that Italians are wrong. Think how often your dentist tells you not to chew on ice. In a similar vein, Italians see ice and iced drinks as shocking to your system and an unhealthy habit. That being said, when it is 90 degrees out and you need to be caffeinated, it is really hard to turn to a steaming hot cup of coffee.
A delicious granita al caffe con panna. Happiness in a cup.
After a month in Italy I had given up many things, the to-go cup for example (they do not exist people! If you ask for a coffee “to go” you will get strange looks and Styrofoam), but I had not given up on ice coffee. So one summer I went on a mission, one that may seem impossible to some: a mission to find a decent ice coffee (what I really mean is an iced latte since they don’t do the drip coffee here, thank god). Easy you say? Not so.
First of all, you may assume that the phrase “iced latte” is relatively straight-forward. It is not. If your asking for something from someone who has never made such a thing and thinks such a request is odd and even maybe a little gross, then you are bound to encounter difficulty.
I tried many different words and word combinations to get the results I was looking for. These included latte con ghiaccio or “latte with ice” (this produced a hot latte with ice cubes in it), latte freddo or “cold latte” (a lukewarm latte), and latte shakerato or “shaken latte.” This last version was, surprisingly, the closest to our iced lattes at home. The order requires that the ice and coffee be shaken in a martini mixer before being poured into your cup. However (and ironically counter to the entire point of asking for a “shaken” latte!), this slightly cooled liquid was then poured into a freshly cleaned, hot cup!
Just past this little church on the left is the entrance
The moral of this story is that the hidden café at Lorenzo de’Medici is a gem (and well hidden! See Map below) and that sometimes you do miss home and it is ok to try and recreate those things you miss about it. However, if I had not found this little café, I would have survived. I swear. Though I do love me an iced coffee every now and then.
The end.
(P.S. – Zoom out to see the location of two of my favorite granita spots.)
View Caffe Lorenzo de’Medici in a larger map
