The local rules
Every place has its own coffee.
Naples does not drink the coffee they drink in Milan. The ten rules of the manifesto are the floor, and they hold everywhere. On top of them each place has its own ten (its hours, its words, its courtesies) and those are written here, by the people who drink there.
Nobody ever wrote the rules of a place. They settled there over the years (in its bars, in its characters, in whatever its history did to it) and a visitor discovers them by getting them wrong.
The point of this page is to write them down. Not to invent them: they already exist. To put them in black and white, ten lines per place, and to let the people who drink that coffee every day decide which ten.
- 1Anybody proposes a ruleOne line. Something you learned by drinking there, or something that place owes you. You do not have to live there, but it helps if you have been.
- 2The community votesWhoever knows that place pushes it up or down. One email, one vote, and the votes are the only thing that ranks anything.
- 3Only the first ten surviveThe ten most voted are the coffee rules of that place. The eleventh waits below the line, and if it starts convincing people it moves up and pushes another one out.
A rule of a place is not a whim. Turin's bicerin comes out of three centuries of cafés with mirrors on the walls. Naples' caffè sospeso was born in a neighbourhood that decided coffee is also offered to whoever is not there yet. The frappé exists because in 1957, at a trade fair in Thessaloniki, one man could not find hot water.
Every rule carries a story, and the story is the reason the rule holds. That is what we are trying to write down before it thins out.
None of this contradicts rule 01. A freddo is a freddo, a qahwa is a qahwa, an espresso is an espresso. Name each thing correctly and you get to drink all of them.
The rules of your city are not finished.
Nothing here.
Try another word, or clear the filters.Not an encyclopedia
This is not an encyclopedia and it does not pretend to be right. It is what the people who showed up have voted for, which is a different and more honest thing. No city is one city: a bar in Trastevere and a bar in Testaccio disagree about half of this, and every family has an aunt who does it differently. If your place is described wrong, you do not have to write to us: propose the rule and let the votes settle it.
Everything here (the manifesto, the city rules, the badge) is yours under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Copy it, translate it, print it, build on it and sell it: name rules.coffee, and leave what you make just as free. What that means in practice.