A morning without a cup of coffee is like a day without sunshine - that's according to Toni Perrone, who runs the second-generation specialty store for Italian food "Italia-Import Perrone" in Dransdorf. An Italian day must start with coffee and is then continued with coffee. "Actually, you drink it all day long - morning, noon, night," Perrone says. "Without it, there's just something very essential missing“.

The Perrone family hails from Nardó in the Puglia region. Coffee, in Puglia as in all of Italy, means an espresso in a tiny cup. With an equally tiny spoonful of sugar, "La dolce vita" (the sweet life) is then stirred into the bitter-strong darkness. Because coffee stands for chatting with friends, for relaxation, for a brief moment of forgetting all worries and stress, for conviviality and carefree conversation, explains the Italian.

In Italy, you traditionally get that little sip of relaxation in a café bar. „Those café bars have nothing to do with the cafés as we know them in Germany. In Italy, you order your coffee at the counter and drink it standing up while chatting with everyone else present. You can find café bars like this everywhere - even in hospitals," says Toni Perrone.

The espresso is served with a sip of water, which you can use to neutralize your mouth before or after drinking it. The sweet life, of which the espresso cup is the symbol, is made even sweeter in the café bars with so-called pasticcini – pastries with sweet creams such as cannoli or croissants.

In Marrakech, a café is a living room that is frequented almost as often as the actual home, says Youssef Mrabet, who runs the Moroccan bistro "Le Petit Marrakesch" on Bonn's Kölnstrasse. "Eating and drinking in Marrakech means the opposite of fast food. When you go to a café, you stay directly for a few hours. You take your time and forget about it.“

Those who don't drink the traditional mint tea order what's called a Ness-Ness. Translated, the word means "half-and-half" and describes the way Morocco's most popular coffee is made: half coffee, half milk in a glass, topped with milk foam. There is another coffee tradition in the medina in Marrakech, adds Mrabet, who grew up there. The coffee is ground with spices such as cloves, anise or cinnamon and thus trumps conventional coffee in its invigorating effect.

Everyone has their regular café, which they visit during their lunch break and after work. People meet acquaintances, friends, and family there – they joke, laugh, exchange news, and even do business here, says Mrabet. So the enjoyment of a Ness-Ness, however small it may be compared to a German coffee, lasts several hours. The glass of coffee is emptied in tiny sips. "It's not uncommon to be asked to warm up the tiny sip again," Mrabet says with a laugh, recalling the café culture of his homeland.

When people arrange to meet for coffee in France, there's really no need to talk about the time. "Coffee drinking" almost always means "after lunch“, report Matthieu Osmont, director of the Institut Français Bonn, and Charlotte de Gail, cultural assistant. Similar to Italy, the cafés where people meet are café-bars - places with a counter that are a pub and café in one.

Osmont and de Gail order a Petit Noir. They get an espresso cup. "But the espresso is not quite as small and concentrated as in Italy. It's extended a little bit with water. In the past, you used to get more of a small cup of black coffee," Osmont says. In Germany, people think of café au lait - a large cup of milk with a sip of coffee - as French coffee. But that is a prejudice, the Frenchman and the Frenchwoman explain. Coffee with a lot of milk is actually unusual for France. At most, the black coffee is colored a little with a tiny drop of milk. Then it is called „noisette". Coffee, de Gail and Osmont report, is a caesura in the daily work routine in France. "There's a contradiction in coffee, of course, but that's what makes it work: It gets you down into relaxation and up into the energy that carries you through the rest of the workday," Osmont says.

"Oriental coffee is the mother of European coffee," says Bonn-based orientalist and linguist Sebastian Heine. The Oriental tradition of preparing coffee dates back to the 17th century, he says, and is the basis for the European way of drinking the pleasure beverage. The basis, which tastes bitter and very strong. Traditional oriental coffee is prepared in a small metal vessel with a handle, explains Heine, who specializes in Turkish, Persian and Arabic languages and has traveled the Arab world countless times. Water is boiled on charcoal in the vessel, and meanwhile, coarsely ground coffee beans are stirred in. "The trick is to keep taking the pot off the fire at the right moment to make the perfect froth," Heine describes.

In his mind, he travels to Beirut, Lebanon, and enters one of the city's oldest cafés, located directly on the Mediterranean Sea: "In spring, the daylight reflecting on the surface of the water is so glaring that it blinds you. That's why the windows of the café are a bit dimmed. When you enter it, you smell not only coffee, but charcoal and tobacco from the hookahs - the smell of another world." It's hard to express what happens to you when you drink the bitter, strong coffee, Heinen muses. But one thing is certain, he says: "Only through coffee do you really get to know the place. It's the key to feeling and experiencing the Oriental world.“

Regarding the attitude toward life in Beirut, the Orientalist says, "Coffee is the drink of writers." Every two meters you see a poet or writer sitting in the café. You could sit down with them at any time and join in the conversation. Because: "Coffee means discussion about intellectual and literary topics," says Heine.

Original text: Sofia Grillo

Translation: Mareike Graepel