Regular

In a small town called Piano D’Orta in Abruzzo there is a café. The town is on a main road; the café is right by the traffic lights. As you approach you are greeted by the stares of the old men sitting outside under big awnings, playing cards, drinking very small glasses of something. They are apparently not fussed by the big lorries that thunder past.

Inside, a music station is playing on several TVs hanging from brackets attached to the ceiling and there are always a couple of video games players having a good work out in an adjacent room. It feels like the 80’s, loud colours, tatty condition; I’d say the chairs were made by a local welder and his friend with the staple gun. The two PCs which you can use to go online (when they haven’t got a virus) have become Caramac coloured.

It is never busy, just a handful of customers at a time, sometimes those old men when it is a bit chilly outside, but usually young folk; either way, people with nothing to do. I imagine that it must be busier in the evening, but I have never been then. Often there is a photocopied notice on the post in the middle of the room advertising a gig by a local band or a coach trip to Naples.

I go there to use the PC. No one notices me except when I go to the bar to ask for a coffee or pay for the PC and even then, whoever serves me is always doing something else at the same time; usually chatting to a worried looking teenager, gazing out towards the street.

The coffee is consistently the best coffee I have drunk in any bar or café anywhere I have ever been, the smallest espresso cup made of the chunkiest china; you just get two sips of that smooth black nectar.