II. The Cold Brew Order

A quick word on the intellectual elite of America. When they come visit, the elite are way less curious than the normal people, the ones who ask questions at gelaterias. While the troopers of tourism do the dirty job of gathering intelligence, the elite are often smug and think they know everything, so they don’t learn anything.

My buddy and I are sitting at a sidewalk table at one of our usual bars; it’s the middle of the morning, and I guess we’re on a coffee break. Sitting opposite us, three American tourists in their thirties are having a conversation. One of them gets up and goes inside for an order, then comes back and tells his pals “They have no cold brew.”

They all sound disappointed. After deliberation, the guy goes back inside and orders some other kind of cold coffee. He comes out with a glass of espresso on ice that looks like something the waiter improvised, considering the weather and the ask.

No one here would prepare bottles of cold water with filters full of coarsely ground specialty coffee best savored after at least eight hours of infusion. The tourists’ expectations blind them. Even if they have a word for it, “dive bar,” they only apply it to bars and not to coffee shops, because even if they have money to travel, they never see things. They don’t know about these kinds of coffee shops.

My buddy is a Communist, the son and grandchild of Communist politicians. His grandma fought as a part of the resistenza against what we call nazifascismo and was arrested and sent to jail. His grandma’s mother was Jewish, and her father was a prominent fascist figure from a small town near Rome (a port town where, these days, cruise ships spew out throngs of tourists headed to the city). I write these bits of information because I think everything that is happening with tourism and food culture is best savored in combination with international politics, and especially the history of World War II and the world it created. To me, it sends electric charges of meaning. 

After witnessing the reaction of the trio, my friend tells me, “They are disappointed there’s no cold brew. They didn’t realize this place cannot have cold brew. They didn’t look around. Do you see P.?” That’s our friend behind the counter, a drifter with an alcoholic mother, who’s a big character in the local scene. “Do you see this bar? This is a lost place. They don’t see any of this. They must have picked it because it’s next to the Airbnb, and they thought it looked the part. They picked this neighborhood because they must have read about it. The neighborhood must have been compared to other neighborhoods around the world. Hip, lively, with a nightlife. Now they expect to have cold brew, but they cannot see that this place could never have cold brew.”

No one here would prepare bottles of cold water with filters full of coarsely ground specialty coffee best savored after at least eight hours of infusion. The tourists’ expectations blind them. Even if they have a word for it, “dive bar,” they only apply it to bars and not to coffee shops, because even if they have money to travel, they never see things. They don’t know about these kinds of coffee shops.

“They’re here, but they’re not here. See how they’re talking now? The tone of their voice? They have passed their judgment on the place, and then they’ll leave and will never know where they were. And yet, even if they’re not here, their arriving to this neighborhood signals that the place is changing. They have arrived. And if they have arrived, the cold brew will arrive. And still, they have no idea about this place where they sat and ordered coffee.”

Every time I have to write about Rome for some publication abroad, I feel like I’m either selling out parts of the city or snitching on friends to foreign secret services. I find myself withholding information. If I described that bar, I’d be both doing promotional work and putting people on Palantir’s AI files. 

The cold brew order is no new behavior. We know what it is. The American empire is just the fourth incarnation of what started as Roman, became Christian European, and then predominantly British. We know what it is. We still have it in our veins, the disdain these tourists are showing. Their carelessness and abstraction. They are the rulers, the ones who believe they are giving meaning to reality for the first time. They have put something in motion. Now that they have asked for cold brew, a set of invisible quakes and rumblings will bring about a moment, very soon, when someone like these three smug yuppies will stop by the dive bar to find that somebody has, in fact, steeped ground coffee in cold water the night before. If they stop by. And eventually some company or fund, maybe even one owned by a relative of these 30-something Americans, will buy both the business and the building. That’s what the elite naturally do. They put the territory in a chokehold.

Come to think of it, the family ordering gelato is such a wholesome scene.

Of course, this trio of more refined tourists picked a more interesting place than the gelato-order family did. The gelato scene took place in a random piazzetta where two bars offer shelter from sun and rain to one of the thousand streams of tourists crisscrossing the historical center. The cold brew trio, on the other hand, showed they belong to the elite by doing research and landing at an interesting corner of the city.

And here I realize I’m resisting the professional duty to describe the corner in question.

A couple of years ago, an important publication in the United States where I would have loved to publish my work asked me to write about a place in Rome. I picked my favorite club, then realized I didn’t want to write an ad for it and see more elite 30-year-old Americans show up at the club and order the nighttime version of a cold brew (a Perfect Manhattan?).

I feel that writing has become a combination of copywriting work to sell stuff and a form of international espionage. Every time I have to write about Rome for some publication abroad, I feel like I’m either selling out parts of the city or snitching on friends to foreign secret services. I find myself withholding information. If I described that bar, I’d be both doing promotional work and putting people on Palantir’s AI files. 

This must be taken into account, for tourism is not made only of the actual bodies that enter gelaterias on a Friday afternoon. Tourism is all this data. The market for all this data. These guys noting that there was no cold brew in that otherwise very lively part of a very important city might really go back and involve some wealthy relative or friend to come buy real estate and market-correct the neighborhood. 

So I’m resisting describing the bar and the neighborhood. Every description will put the described people in the AI eye of Palantir while bringing more international investors to this part of town.

Just imagine a paragraph here where I tell you what the trio has missed by only asking the yes or no question about cold brew and by not paying attention to anything else. Imagine the interesting descriptions of the owners of the coffee shop. The outrageous life the older owner has lived. The sketchy past. The sketchy present, for crying out loud. Imagine me romanticizing the owner’s life and then waxing poetic about the younger owner, a real legend in local night life. Just imagine the Zolaesque description of the bar’s regulars, the various cliques, the debauched sex life, the romantic drug-addled breakdowns. A whole Mubi watchlist of city types. Imagine me writing copy for this corner of the city so it’s there for real estate to come and get it. 

To write fiction or narrative nonfiction these days is to fuel real estate speculation. Think about it. Can we still write in good faith after the Gomorrah and My Brilliant Friend multimedia franchises jump-started Naples’s belated gentrification?

Everything is tourism and everything is real estate.

III. The Borghetto di Merda

There’s a guy in my neighborhood who opens bars and restaurants. The first one was successful and is a sort of touchpoint in the area. The others are not particularly successful. Still, he’s managed to keep them all open through the years. Each of them is different, as if he were trying to corner all the market needs in an area where, with the exception of supermarkets, there are no chain businesses.  

Recently, this local businessman saw the future once again.

I’ll tell it the way I experienced it.

Three of his businesses are located at an intersection that is very busy at night. The long, narrow one-way streets don’t have sidewalks, and so people walk down the middle of them. The scene is lively from 6 p.m. until the early hours of the morning. 

At one specific intersection, a mechanic closed shop ages ago. I can’t even remember when. The place looked shabbier and shabbier as the years went by. It’s the look of the neighborhood, so nobody wondered what would happen to it. A big yard, abandoned, a shadowy ruin amid all that nightlife, near all the bars and clubs.

Then the ruin became a construction site, but still nothing seemed to really happen. 

Then one of the walls came down, but you couldn’t sneak a peek; the view was blocked by tarps and construction material.

It didn’t look like anything in all of Rome. It was a combination of styles. A Pinterest mash-up. The light installations, signs, and windows were all different in style. The name of one of the places was either made up or Swedish. The result was completely abstract, like it was still trapped in the architect’s computer.

One night, very late, I was walking home, and I saw a hole in the tarp hiding the site. I went and looked. The lot had been turned into a courtyard, and at its center, I saw a fountain. It was clearly out of place, made to look like a fountain in a piazzetta of some touristy village in the center of Italy or in the south. Nonspecific, old looking. The kind of fake architecture that you find in the private “plazas” in between skyscrapers in big cities. That you find in malls.

The construction took a long time. We tried gathering information, and somebody even asked someone who knew the local businessman. 

Turns out, the guy had the idea of building a plaza that would cater to the people who stayed in nearby buildings that had been converted into short-time rentals. The buildings were colorful, sort of like upmarket hostels, but made up of small apartments. These tourists, he thought, might have liked to have the following: a bakery with an Italian flavor, a forno; a place to sip wine, that’s an enoteca. Both places would also sell souvenirs: mugs and totes and wine accessories with witty statements about croissants and alcohol. A third place would provide well-crafted objects. You know, plates, ceramics, glasses. Tasteful, simple.

And then one night it was open.

It didn’t look like anything in all of Rome. It was a combination of styles. A Pinterest mash-up. The light installations, signs, and windows were all different in style. The name of one of the places was either made up or Swedish. The result was completely abstract, like it was still trapped in the architect’s computer. The attempt at a borghetto, a small village, half Tuscany, half Puglia maybe, a borghetto with no soul and no genius loci, a shitty place, a borghetto di merda.

It was packed with people from the first night I saw it. It offers two benches and a bunch of tables. The same kind of solace you get from those rest areas in malls.

People are sitting on the private benches the businessman placed in the fake piazzetta, and they are gauging what they’re seeing. This local businessman’s other successful project, the restaurant, which is also a bar, was one of the first places to make the idea of living here palatable to the young people of the creative class. This area was only famous because of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film. Artists came to live here in the nineties; my friends first started to move here in the early 2000s. The restaurant features pictures of the kids who used to hang out with Pasolini. In the pictures, the Pasolini kids are already middle-aged people playing pool in a former incarnation of the place, when it was a neon-lit bar. By then, most of the pool players were being priced out of the neighborhood, invisibly forced to vacate the premises to let in a new generation. 

Businesspeople always have a feel for what people will need — or rather, what they will want — and bend reality to accommodate it.

I still eat at this restaurant occasionally. It’s quintessentially “bobo,” that useful French contraction of bourgeois and bohemian. By now, I’ve known the workers there forever. When it opened, it felt like the one place that made everything else feel readable, decipherable. So you would go there, even if the place was evidently cruel. The people portrayed in the framed pictures the very people who were now being invisibly forced to vacate the premises to let the new, younger people in. The restaurant and bar looked retro. It made us feel that there was a very natural transition from the dignified, poor suburbs to us, admirers of Pasolini’s work and lifestyle. We thought this place wanted us.

Now, with the Pinterest borghetto, the businessman is catering to somebody else’s needs. Let’s try and define who this somebody else is. There are locals looking for more comfortable areas to sit and consume or just be, and Romans from other neighborhoods wanting a more contemporary nightlife experience. Then there’s people who make money from tourists — the people with big money who buy buildings and renovate them to turn them into businesses that cater to the people who populate the short-term rentals.

The businessman who opened the bobo restaurant had created a new reality for a certain set of people. By giving the creative class a restaurant from which they could admire Pasolini’s world, he had, metaphorically, brought cold brew coffee to a place where there was barely money enough for coffee machines. Businesspeople always have a feel for what people will need — or rather, what they will want — and bend reality to accommodate it.

✺

The American tourist is curious about your gelato and is disappointed you can’t give him cold brew. Businessmen listen and take notes, and the world keeps evolving, by way of invisible real estate transactions, so that every curiosity is satisfied and every new need is met.

The American tourist used to be regarded as the most obnoxious creature in the world. Loud, naïve, ham fisted, needy. The reason I told you about the opening of this borghetto di merda is that it made me realize: Now we are all American tourists. The people who come here want to hang out in a Pinterest fever dream. That tastelessness that was so easy to call American is now everybody’s. It belongs to the class that has the money to build.

Last spring, as I was sipping an iced matcha in New York because some friends’ teenage daughter introduced me to it on a vacation abroad and I now liked it, a British writer told me she didn’t know I was so frivolous. I shrugged, as that drink only reminded me of my friends’ quirky, jovial daughter. Then I saw the memes. Then I heard Japan was running out of tea, thanks to the new popularity of matcha around the world.

Our role, as tourists of existence, is to see an ad, react, send the signal to the businesspeople. A month from now, the coffee shop down the street will have cold brew, and we will make a mental note, nod, and be content.