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No, not Bourbon and coffee. Bourbon
Coffee.
I swear that this is exactly what the home
page blurb for Caffè Borbone has up in English:
“A monday morning, on the 10th
of May 1984,
Charles of
Borbon, before coming to Tokio, wanted to stop in the convent of Minimi
Friars,
just outside Porta Capitone. He wanted to taste that dark beverage,
rich of
intense scents, with strong and decided taste, that was told to possess
the
property to strengthen the body and the soul, and that was prepared so
scrupulously by the friars for the new King. That was the period during
the
which the Neapolitan taste in preparing the coffee was born. And 2500
years
later, the technologies change and get better, but the passion and the
care in
preparing the real coffee in the Neapolitan way is stronger for us, as
only
neapolitan people are able to do.”
Astute historians
will note that the merry
prankster webmeister
(whose grandfather apparently took two Berlitz lessons in English in
1949) is
goofing
around. I looked at the Italian page and it has the correct “Napoli”
for “Tokio” and, correctly, “Porta Capuana” for “Capitone” (a large
eel). It
also has the correct “250 years” for “2500” years. Strangely, however,
the date
is wrong even in the Italian, which has “1894” and not “1984.” The
correct year
for Charles III of Bourbon to have
entered Naples
as the new king would have been 1734. (Of course, there was a descendant
Charles of Bourbon alive in 1984, but his kingdom had long since
gone
belly
up.) (Interestingly—or maybe not—that wrong date, 1894, is the year in
which the last Bourbon king of Naples, Francis
II, the great-great-grandson of the first Bourbon king, died;
furthermore, I will bet you one coffee with lots of Bourbon in it that
the people who run that website don't know that.)
Stranger than the mistakes, intentional and
unintentional,
is the picture in the ad. I’m not sure that this is really Charles III,
the
benevolent and capable first king of the Bourbon dynasty. It looks
rather like his
son, the moronoid Ferdinand—the Lout King, King Big Nose. He stares out
at you
from the billboard next to the filling station, holds up his cup of
Caffè
Borbone and asks, “And you?—What do you drink?” Actually, if he were
around to
see this, he’d get a kick out of it. This was the monarch who used to
wander
down to the harbor and help the fisherman sell their wares after the
morning’s
catch. Now he’s selling coffee. If, on the other hand, it really is his
father, the dignified and very royal Charles III—well, he would not be
amused.
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