History of Coffee: Spread of coffee consumption throughout Europe

History of Coffee: Spread of coffee consumption throughout Europe
Coffee consumption rapidly spread to the French-speaking cantons of Switzerland and then to the rests of that country after taking hold of France.

Cafés were extremely successful in Italy during the 18th century. There were for example, 206 cafés in Venice (where the first coffee house in Europe is said to have opened in 1645), 40 in Padua, and many others in Rome, Florence, Turin and Naples.

At that time, the Italians were already drinking concentrated and very sweet coffee, “caffe ristretto”.

In Venice, the first big cafes at the end of the 17th century were the Florian and the Quadri in Saint-Mark’s Square.

Starting around 1700, Austria and the Scandinavia countries became big customers of coffee.

The first two Swedish coffeehouses were opened in Stockholm in 1690. In 1671, Fauste Nauron of Syria, a Maronite and professor of Oriental languages in Rome, wrote in Latin the first treatise in coffee.

Cultivation of coffee trees outside of the Middle East began only at the start of the 17th century.

Dutch merchants imported the first coffee plant into Holland from Mocha in 1616.

The coffee trees were cultivated in Ceylon in 1658 and in Java in 1696. The plants of Coffea Arabica imported from Arabia were destroyed by a flood but the cuttings imported in 1699 from Malabar into Java were the origin for all the coffee trees of the East Indies as well as those of the botanical gardens of Amsterdam; from there they were eventually exported to most of the botanical gardens of Europe.

A first but unsuccessfully planting took place in Dijon in 1670. In 1713, new attempts at transplanting coffee trees from Amsterdam to Paris were once again failures.

In 1714, the burgomaster of Amsterdam offered several coffee tree plants to King Louis XIV who entrusted them to Antoine de Jussieu, director of the botanical gardens.

These plants were the ancestor of coffee plants of the former French colonies and of part of Latin America.
History of Coffee: Spread of coffee consumption throughout Europe