Answer: How much is a cappuccino at the cafe near here?

[Dan Russell]

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Answer: How much is a cappuccino at the cafe near here?

You might recognize the place... 

Most of this week's Challenge wasn't too hard--but the last Challenge question is tough.  Let's jump into it.  

This pic from last year brought forth a couple of Challenges for you:  

1. Where am I standing in this photo?  

For some reason, I thought the partially obscured view would make image identification difficult--but I was totally wrong.  If you just do a simple Search by Image, you'll find that this are the results you see: 

 I did this by saving the image to a file, then uploading that file into Images.Google.com, which produced several lovely images (including my own).  A quick scan of the results tells you that this was taken at St. Mark's Basilica (Basilica di Marco).  With just a bit more poking around, you'll find that the brick tower in the background is St Mark's Campanile (Italian: Campanile di San Marco, Venetian: Canpanièl de San Marco), and the statue of the horses is the Quadriga di San Marco--although the one behind me is a copy of the original, which is housed in the museum. 

 

Here's a pic with an arrow pointing to where I'm standing.  Yes, I'm on the roof (but that's okay!).  

2. Can you tell me how much a cappuccino costs at that famous nearby cafe at the moment?  (Extra credit: Why is this particular cafe so famous?)  

What's the famous cafe?  The obvious query works well: 

     [ famous cafe piazza san marco ] 

 How much is a cappuccino there?  

Initially, my query was [ menu Caffe Florian ] -- but that proved to be ambiguous.  (You know how many cafes are called "Caffe Florian"?)  So I added in the location: 

     [ menu caffee florian venice ] 

Which led me to the Caffè Florian website.  If you download the PDF, you'll see on page 27: 

For the "why is this cafe famous?" Challenge, I tried the obvious Google query:  

     [ why is the Caffe Florian famous? ] 

which led me back to the Caffè Florian's website.  Of course, you have to take what they write about themselves with a grain of salt--they're heavily motivated to have a large claim to fame.  But in fact, the website is fairly history-free--certainly no exaggerated claims.  The Wikipedia page on Caffè Florian gives a good deal more background.

There are many reasons for the cafe to be famous, but in its early days, the Caffè was patronised by many celebrities of the time, including the playwright Carlo Goldoni, Lord Byron, Marcel Proust, Charles Dickens, Goethe and Casanova... who was no doubt attracted by the fact that Caffè Florian was the only coffee house that allowed women. 

The cafe is also famous for Casanova's late night stop on Oct 31, 1756... the night that Giacomo Casanova broke out of prison, but before fleeing into the dark, he stopped for a quick cup of coffee.  Of course.   

3. Can you tell me how much a cappuccino would have cost at that cafe in 1955?  (For extra credit, can you determine why I'm asking about 1955?)  

It turns out that THIS is a difficult Challenge.  I've tried all kinds of things--looking for old menus, searching the Internet Archive, looking in old books for mentions of buying a cappuccino in 1955 Venice--but no dice.  At least not so far!  I'm widening the Challenge just a bit to see if we can't figure out the cost of a coffee in Venice in the 1950s--but even that is proving difficult.  Apparently, the price of a coffee / espresso / cappuccino was so obvious that it didn't need writing down!  

But take heart--I have some leads.  This little tidbit of info is just harder to find than most.  I'll be back in a few days with an update on this Challenge.  

Meanwhile... the extra credit question is pretty straightforward.  The query:  

     [ Caffe Florian 1955 ] 

leads to several hits, but perhaps the most interesting is the discovery that the book The Talented Mr. Ripley, which is set in Venice and has scenes in Caffe Florian, was published in 1955.  What's more, the movie Summertime, starring Katherine Hepburn, also came out in 1955--again, with scenes set in Caffe Florian.  Here's the trailer for that movie--see if you can spot the Piazza San Marco and a coffee shop

 there... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TRHz0UGfTg  

I'll summarize our lessons next time.  But until then... Keep searching! 

--

Daniel M. Russell 

Check out my new book:  The Joy of Search (MIT Press, Winter, 2019) 

Available in fine bookstores (and online) everywhere.