There are plenty of things Italy does well – pizza dough, gelato, red wine, the list goes on – but one thing it does better than quite literally everywhere else is good, cheap coffee.
For a long time now, locals and tourists have been able to nip into one of Italy’s many, many (roughly 132,000) coffee bars and grab an espresso for as little as €1 – in the past, prices were even regulated by the state. It’s thought that six billion coffees are consumed in Italy every year.
So, how come the stuff has historically been so cheap in Italy? Well, unlike in other countries, coffee suppliers in Italy often cover the cost of opening a café, which saves the people who run them a whole load of cash.
There’s also a culture of family-run cafés, meaning they don’t need to hire (and pay) too many staff, particularly when ordering an espresso in Italy is barely more than a 45-second transaction. However, this culture could all be about to change.
The fact is that coffee bean prices have soared by 48 percent in the last year, and trebled since 2018. It’s been reported that this is largely because of poor harvests in Vietnam and Brazil (the world’s two biggest coffee producers) and supply chain issues between Europe and Asia since November 2023 (because of militant attacks in the Red Sea), and it’s becoming hard for businesses to keep prices low.
‘Coffee is not thought of as a product in Italy, but as a human right,’ Andrea Pettinari, owner of coffee shop Caffe dell’Arte, tells the Telegraph. ‘But if you keep the price of espresso at a euro, it’s unsustainable for everybody in the supply chain – farmers, baristas, cafe owners. Suddenly there is no margin of profit.’
But do you think Italians will give up their €1 caffeine hit just like that? No, neither do we. Customers have become so accustomed to the coffee prices that raising it becomes a political issue, and baristas, who tend to be pretty involved in the community, feel an immense amount of pressure to not change the price.
‘A product like an espresso is a necessity — like bread,’ said Luciano Sbraga, deputy president of the Federation of Italian Public Establishments, to the Financial Times, ‘When customers have the perception of such an importance of the product, it is not easy to raise the prices.’
So, we’ll have to wait and see what happens, and if Italy’s baristas resist or succumb to peer pressure. For now, here’s our roundup of the best things to do in Italy.
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