A Place To Read A Book And Write A Letter: Caffe Greco

As my trip to Lyon was thwarted by the high altitude powers of travel, I committed to carry out my travel plans here in Rome. I was taking a Hemingway novel and a notebook to France in order to truly read a book and write a few letters. As it happened, this can actually be done in Rome. And to think I had been traveling untold hours and trespassing against untold horrors to do this elsewhere!

I took a tip from a travel book and took a left, going north (these two directions do not always correlate with one another; be wary of such broad generalizations) towards the Spanish Steps, and eventually went into the Caffe Greco. The Caffe Greco, as it announces upon your entrance, is 248 years old - it was founded in 1760. Since then, it has been the swank haven of writers like Byron, Keats, and, yes, Hemingway, but really, was there a bar in Europe Hemingway didn't visit? The place was so overrunning with literary depression that an Italian named Giorgio De Chirico said it was the cafe where you sit and await the end. Writers are the most depressing people on the face and body of all planets, truly.

The cafe is one long hallway connecting several parlors, creating the biggest coffee shop I have ever been in. And it was filled to the rafters. The tables were marble topped and the chairs were wood and velvet, and there wasn't a free specimen of either, except in the hallway, where I sat. The walls changed color in each room, but were unified by a antique motif running throughout; the walls looked as if they hadn't been repainted since the Great War. Not that you could really see them, they were so covered with knick-knacks. Painting and scrapes of paper plastered the walls, from all the artists who had passed through them. The decorations even spilled over into sections usually deemed unfit for decor - door frames and crown moulding, too, held up portraits and even collector's plates. Ghosts of great minds drank coffee beside me; for myself, this was a sort of pilgrimage.

Sadly, the Caffe Greco has, for lack of a fancier term, sold out. The Spanish Steps are now home to Prada, Gucci, and the like, and I am almost certain they do not turn a profit, so steep are their prices. But shoppers flood the streets in a depressing way, and most people end up getting fleeced by men selling purses or watches on the sidewalks. Those who filled the Caffe Greco to the rafters were not poor writers but Japanese and American tourists, attracted by the aura. This wouldn't be so bad, if the Caffe Greco hadn't given in, but it sold it's soul, to the tune of six euros a cappuccino (which, by the way, is over six times the cost of a cup anywhere else).

Adding insult to injury, a further saddening me about the state of things in general, was Hemingway. Raise your hand if you knew Hemingway was so depressing? Well, that makes just you. I can't really say what I expected, personally, but I know that I did not expect life to be so terrible. I am going to rethink living for a little.

Or at least I was, until I went home and watched Pushing Daisies. I tell you truly, that show is all the fables and fairy tales that mankind has, run through a strainer of happiness. It could cheer up even Hemingway, if it caught him off guard.