In the caffès, play was always going on, I believe, in a greater or less degree. These establishments, so indispensable to an Italian's existence, must not be identified with the fairy-like structures of mirrors, chandeliers, and arcades, that Paris and some of the principal cities of Italy exhibit. In all the inferior towns which I have visited, one description of a caffè may serve to convey a very correct idea of the totality. A middle-sized room, opening on the street—in summer with an awning, benches, and little round tables outside the door; within, similar benches and round tables, a very dirty brick floor, and a dark region at the back, from whence ices, lemonades, _eau sucrée_, coffee, chocolate, fruit syrups, and occasionally punch—denominated _un ponch_, and cautiously partaken of—are served out. Youths with cadaverous faces and mustachios, in white jackets striped with blue, answering to the appellation of _bottega_, fly about like ministering genii, and from four or five o'clock in the morning till past twelve at night, know repose only as a name.
The caffè likewise comprehends the office of confectioner and pastrycook, and no cakes or sweetmeats can be procured but what it furnishes; sorry compositions, it must be owned, their predominant flavour being that of tobacco, with which, from being kept on a counter in the general room, amid a thick cloud of smoke from a dozen or so of detestable cigars, they are naturally impregnated. They are inexpensive delicacies, however; for the value of a half-penny such gigantic puffs of pastry and preserve, such blocks of sponge-cake garnished with deleterious ornaments, such massive compounds of almond and white of egg are obtainable, as would make a schoolboy's eyes glisten with delight. Sold at half-price the next day—a farthing, be it remembered—they are purchased by poor people for their children's slight matutinal refection. We could never persuade one of my uncle's servants, the father of a family, that a piece of bread would have been a far more wholesome breakfast for children of five or six years old, than a little weak coffee, and one of these stale cakes. He would shake his head, and say it was more _civile_, _i. e._ refined, for the _povere creature_ than bread; as for brown bread—_soldiers' bread_, as they contemptuously term it—being reduced to that, is considered the extremity of degradation.