No cappuccino after 10am! The habits you need to know to become a true Roman

Drinking coffee at the bar in the morning is a deeply rooted Italian tradition, and the terraces are often packed from the early hours of the morning. But Italians don't spend hours at the bar, and espresso is drunk quickly before going to work. As a result, the Romans may take a dim view of you if you quietly dip your croissant in the coffee for half an hour! In any case, dipping all sorts of things into your coffee, whether it's quick or not, is considered bizarre by everyone outside France, isn't it? The right thing to do is to drink an espresso (not eXpresso!) from the bar in two gulps.

While espresso can be drunk all day long, cappuccino can only be drunk before 10am and is only tolerated before 12pm. The reason for this is purely dietary: milk foam is very bad for digestion and sugar is simply to be avoided. This sound advice quickly turns into an inviolable tradition, so much so that anyone asking for a cappuccino in the afternoon will inevitably be categorised as a tourist.

Carrying change is a Roman tradition. There's no question of paying for your espresso with your card: the minimum amount often starts at €20 when there's enough to pay by card! Italy ranks 17th out of 20 countries in a study of the biggest users of card payments in Europe in 2022. France is well ahead of Italy in sixth place, with 43% of transactions made by card, compared with 26% for the Italians (according to a study carried out by hellosafe on 20 countries between 2019 and 2022). Cash is also used to pay the many market stallholders, public toilets, small restaurants and so on.

Be careful what you ask for on your pizza! Some of the pizze you can find in France would quickly be seen as an assault on Italian gastronomy. It's out of the question to ask for chicken, smoked salmon or even worse: pineapple on your pizza. The pizzaiolo might even think you're disrespecting him, and there's no laughing matter on that subject. The best thing to do is to listen to or ask for suggestions from the duce, the Italian chef.

Has a beautiful Italian man or woman asked you to meet them " sotto il balcone ", or "under the balcony", and you've been all over Rome's balconies to no avail? Don't panic, we'll explain. The balcony simply refers to the balcony of the Palazzo di Venizia, the very place where Mussolini proclaimed the birth of the Italian Empire. Almost 90 years later, people are still referring to this balcony to make a date in Rome.