Let's have a coffee is the participatory performance Daniela Beltrani proposes as an Open Studio for the Fifth Edition of Rome Art Week 2020.

Coffee is the most loved and consumed beverage in Italy. Once known as the "devil's drink" due to its Muslim origin, in the early 1600s Clement VIII ruled in favor of it and allowed Catholics to consume it.

This decreed the birth and spread of the coffee shop, which over the years became a place not only for convivial aggregation, but also for meetings by cultured men, writers, philosophers and politicians.

In 1992 the philosopher Marc Sautet began a series of Sunday meetings at the Café des Phares in Paris to advertise his new philosophical consulting firm. The popularity of the meetings in which philosophical themes were dealt with, and to which an increasing number of participants flocked, decreed the rediscovery of the philosophical café, in vogue in France in the 1700s.

Subsequently, in 1995, Sautet published the book Un café pour Socrate, in which he suggests how philosophy can teach us to understand today's world.

Inspired by the popularity of the café philo, widespread in France and other parts of the world, but non-existent in Italy, Daniela will propose to the patrons of the bar to start a discussion on the big questions of life, in exchange for an espresso. In English or Italian.

To comply with the anti Covid-19 provisions in force, the meetings will be limited to one person at a time, for 10 minutes, at a distance of one metre and with a mask (with the exception of when consuming the coffee).

Daniela wishes to thank Marco and Nando of Caffè ai Banchi Vecchi.