Caffè philo is the participatory performance Daniela Beltrani proposes as an Open Studio for the Sixth Edition of Rome Art Week 2021.
Coffee (qahwa) 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 Pope Clement VIII ruled in favour 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 people walking on Piazza Testaccio to start a discussion on the big questions of life, in exchange for an espresso. In English or Italian.
