Caffè Confetteria Al Bicerin has been open since 1793 and is one of Turin’s historic cafes.This historic Turin café favored by Camillo Benso Conte di Cavour, is logically famous for its specialty: the famous bicerin. A typical Turinese hot drink made with coffee, chocolate and cream, for which the café (jealously) holds the original recipe.Umberto Eco describes it beautifully in his novel The Prague Cemetery :"… I had gone as far as one of the legendary places in Turin at the time. Dressed as a Jesuit, and enjoying with malice the astonishment I aroused, I went to the Café Al Bicerin, near the Consolata, to get that glass, smelling of milk, cocoa, coffee and other aromas. I did not yet know that even Alexandre Dumas, one of my heroes, would write about the bicerin a few years later, but in the course of two or three raids to that magical place I had learned all about that nectar… The bliss of that setting with its iron exterior frame, the advertising panels on either side, the cast-iron columns and capitals, the interior wooden boiseries decorated with mirrors and the marble tables, the counter behind which sprouted jars, almond-scented, of forty different kinds of sugared almonds… I liked to place myself in observation particularly on Sundays, because the drink was the nectar of those who, having fasted to prepare for communion, sought solace by coming out of the Consolata — and the bicerin was sought after in times of Lenten fasting because hot chocolate was not considered food. Hypocrites. But, pleasures of coffee and chocolate aside, what gave me satisfaction was appearing something else: the fact that people did not know who I really was gave me a sense of superiority. I possessed a secret."
