The Giubbe Rosse Cafe in Florence a Literary and Political Alcove from Futurism to Anti-Fascist Resistance (Florence, Italy) (Report‪)‬

The literary cafes in Italy and indeed all over Europe have made the history of culture and ideas of that country and that continent, at least, since the eighteenth century. The importance of cafes had noticeably increased throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, but it slowly diminished in the second half. (1) Today, even though many of them still exist and resist struggling between an imposing past and the demands of contemporary lifestyles, the role of the literary cafes is definitely declining with the advent of recent technological innovations and the rise of the internet cafe. In Italy, a comforting sign of this ineluctable rite of passage is the journal Il Caffe Illustrato, which takes its name from the cafe as institution and, at the same time, continues the tradition of another journal, called, in fact, Il Caffe, the eighteenth-century journal of the Milanese Enlightenment. In the nineteenth century, the literary cafes are characteristic places of entertainment and culture all over Europe: in Italy, the most notable cafes are in the most vibrant cities, from the afore-mentioned Milan to Venice, from Florence to Rome, from Naples to Palermo. Yet, the period between the two World Wars was fatal to the cafes and they slowly disappeared or were mortified to the more modest role of cafes, without the cultural aura or the intellectual energy that had enriched them.