Specialty coffee in Brescia

The café under the arcades of Piazza Vittoria opened in 1935 under the name Impero — a name to match the era. The people of Brescia never took it up: they said el cafè de le ciape, the café of the buttocks, because from its tables you looked at the backside of a naked marble colossus the city had christened Bigio. After the war dynamite was set under the statue — it lost a leg, an arm and its fig leaf — and then it was carted off to a municipal warehouse. The sign above the door stayed, but the name of the place was given by the street, not the owner.