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, believes 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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