Thankfully Italy is still largely a land of small businesses and nowhere is this more apparent than in restaurants and, particularly, bars.

This beautiful country is still essentially free of monstrosities like star-a-buckets and costalots (although one of them has recently opened in Milan and, in concession to Italian class and quality, has had to serve drinkable coffee in a surrounding which is probably the finest this chain has ever possessed):

Most bars retain their own individuality. I am particularly drawn to those bar-owners who are collectors. For example, at Aulla station this bar (since regretfully closed) had a scenic model railway running round its interior perimeter:

(See my post at https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/on-or-off-the-rails-to-pontremoli/ for more).

If you’re a biker, or even just a mopedier, rather than a rail anorak then there’s the extraordinary bar-pizzeria described in my post at https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/the-wild-one/ :

While traipsing around Florence the other week I chanced upon a bar whose owner was an avid collector of the hippie bus.

In case you don’t know what a hippie bus is it’s the Volkswagen Type 2, introduced in 1950 (sadly discontinued now) and officially known as the Kombi but better known to us travellers to eastern promises during the idyllic sixties as the hippie bus.

The owner told me his cabinet display was just a small part of his collection. His passion for the type 2 was ingrained in him for years and many exquisite examples of the ‘Kombi’ were donated to the bar owner from friends.

I admit I didn’t travel to Kathmandu on a type 2 but in a superior class (as Janis Joplin might have sung) Mercedes Benz. L 319 which transported me as far as Teheran.

Here it is in Beirut before that ghastly civil war and even greater post-war building vandalism destroyed the exquisite charm of this Paris of the Levant.

Anyway, sipping a caffè macchiato con un pezzo dolce con crema in that Florentine bar, surrounded by seductive models of the classic L319 really started my day in a big way for me; Florence was no longer just a place where

in the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

(From T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in case you’re one of those ‘rational’ people who don’t read poetry).