Is It Bad Form to Order a Cappuccino After 11 A.M. in Italy?

Not only did a friend tell John Flinn never to order a cappuccino after 11 a.m. in Italy “because Italians think it’s barbaric,” but Flinn found the same advice repeated on countless Web sites. Anyone who breaks the 11 a.m. rule, common wisdom seems to dictate, will immediately be exposed as a good-for-nothing ignorant tourist. Flinn wondered whether Italians were really that judgmental. “I tried to imagine the reaction if a Belgian tourist walked into a McDonalds in, say, Cincinnati, and asked for mayonnaise for his fries,” he writes in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. “It would draw, at most, a bemused shrug, wouldn’t it? Would an Italian waiter react to a post-11 a.m. cappuccino request any differently?” Flinn set out to find the answer on his last trip to Italy. What did he discover?

At a Roman cafe around 3 p.m., he saw plenty of Romans—gasp—sipping cappuccinos.

“They were doing so right out in the open, without a trace of shame, and it didn’t seem to be causing a scandal,” he writes.

Flinn advises all travelers to question common travel wisdom.

He writes: “I can’t speak for the rest of Italy—on previous visits I’ve never paid this issue any attention—but in Rome, go ahead and order a cappuccino any time you want. You’ll just be doing as the Romans do.”

Related on World Hum:
* ‘Some 60 Percent of Italian Restaurants Abroad Are Awful’
* The Pasta Nazi
* Out: Bad Hotel Room Coffee. In: Gourmet Joe.
* Chopsticks Faux Pas and Other Cultural Land Mines in Japan

Photo by roevin via Flickr, (Creative Commons).