It’s 10 AM on a June morning in Piedmont, in a town nestled in a valley where smog from the agro-industrial farms in the surrounding hills traps the air like a sauna. It’s already hot, in a way that makes my trust issues surface when the weather app says it’s only 30℃. The humidity makes it feel like 40, at least. Heading down to the coffee bar at my street corner, I prepare myself for the mental gymnastics ahead. The barista and I have been doing the same song and dance for weeks now: I ask for a caffè freddo. He pretends to not understand what that means. I explain that I’d like an espresso, but in a glass, with ice. He looks bewildered, as if we haven’t had this conversation at least seven other times in the last ten days. Un caffè crema? He says, pointing to the frappuccino-esque slushy whirling in a machine behind the counter. No, un caffè normale, in un bicchiere con ghiaccio. I have rehearsed this line, so I’m confident that even my broken Italian is doing the trick here. Every day, he rolls his eyes as if I’ve just made the most outlandish request one could imagine, while reluctantly plopping a single ice cube in a steaming hot cup of espresso. I ask for a glass of ice on the side, so that I can Macgyver my iced coffee by myself. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don’t. On the days I don’t, he pretends not to remember the previous days when he has acquiesced to my very North American request. Sometimes I’ll push my luck and get a glass of cold milk on the side, so I can adjust to my liking, but that doubles the price of my order and the length of the conversation, so I save it for special occasions.
At this stage, you might be thinking, why not just go to another cafe? Would that I could, would that I could. There are another five cafes between my apartment and the bus stop I need to take to school, three of them don’t even have an ice machine. Or at least they pretend not to. The fourth went into a five-minute-long, near-hysterical rant about the fact that ice was reserved only for cocktails at aperitivo time (surely they could just make more ice by then?) and the fifth just flat-out said “no”.
Italy–despite being a country that gets very, very hot in summer (and increasingly so as global temps continue to rise)–does not believe in iced beverages. You’ll find ice in your cocktails, of course (though there is an ongoing dispute about how much is acceptable so as not to water them down), but water always comes tepid and coffee always comes hot. As a Canadian, I grew up in the shadow of the United States’ verging-on-manic obsession with ice. To me, the most distinct mark of the seasons changing is the first day when it’s warm enough to go out in a t-shirt and switch my morning hot coffee for an iced one. I cherish the sound of the cubes rattling in my glass, the feeling of the crystals crunching between my teeth. A summer without iced beverages to me feels as ludicrous as a winter without hot ones.
The vehement denial of iced beverages here all stems from Italians’ deep-seated phobia of colpo d’aria and congestione (abdominal cramping). To contract either would be a fate worse than death, and drinking iced beverages is too great a risk to take. Frankly, this staunch hypochondria feels a little rich to me considering this is a country where the espresso is so strong it could burn a hole in your stomach, you have to be willing to trade a vital organ to get a fresh vegetable at a restaurant, and 25% of the population has a cigarette permanently affixed to their hand. We are all a mess of contradictions and slaves to our vices–that is the human experience–but of all of the vices in the world to have, ice seems like a pretty chill one, no?
It is true that drinking iced water can slow down digestion: the energy your body takes to recalibrate after being essentially shocked by the cold sliding through your GI tract takes away from the energy that normally would be spent metabolizing food, leading to a delayed digestion process and possible side effects of bloating, cramping, or constipation. However, the very same can be said of anything served at temperatures close to freezing point–namely, granita and gelato. And Italians imbibe both of those with gusto (as they should). So why are we cherry-picking? Everything in life comes with a certain balance of risk and reward, that’s just the way it goes. Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin.
Look, I’m no scientist, but it feels to me like an easy solution would be to simply not drink iced beverages with a meal. But this ice phobia is so entrenched in Italian society that you won’t even find ice machines at most bars and restaurants, nor bags of ice at the grocery store–a beloved staple of Americana. The first time I hosted a dinner party here, I asked a friend to pick up a bag of ice on her way over. Two hours later, she showed up, panicked and apologetic: she had checked every shop in town and couldn’t find any. We made do by filling a small bucket with frozen peas to keep the drinks cold.
By contrast, we North Americans take our reverence for ice to preposterous heights. In 1842, an industrious ice-lover invented the first functional ice machine, which was also kind of the first iteration of AC–he hypothesized that hanging ice from the ceiling in hospitals could help stave off the spread of infection, according to an article in the New Yorker. The theory behind it isn’t totally flawed; freezing things does indeed kill harmful bacteria, but Italians and their fear of colpo d’aria would surely dispute him. The point is that Americans really latched on to this concept, and started adding ice to everything. It’s the same general reason why in North America we refrigerate our eggs and dairy, and Europeans tend not to (well, that and the differing pasteurization and animal rearing processes, but that’s a story for another day). So, the American hyperfixation on refrigeration and ice thus also stems from hypochondria, just of a different nature. Two siblings with the same inherited trauma, manifested in opposite ways.
And here’s where my Canadian-ness comes back in, or maybe I just read the story of Goldilocks too many times as a child: I just want a nice, reasonable middle ground. As much as I don’t want to drink piping hot espresso and room-temperature water in the heat of summer, I equally do not want brain-freezing ice water in the cold of winter. Empower the people! Let us make our own decisions about if and when we want ice, and how much. In this way and so many others (looking at you both, America and Italy), I want the right to choose. And that starts with my morning caffè freddo.
