Op-Egg: Why Italians are always searching for breakfast

By Nelson Griddle

The Italians, it seems, Google the word “breakfast” more than anybody else.

Odd, when breakfast tends to be the merest side-step on the long gastronomic ramble that is the average Italian’s day.

My own experiences of breakfasting in Italy are forgettable. The first time I went to Venice, I had breakfast in a converted nunnery. We had coffee and rolls in a large, bare refectory. Any further impression this repast might have made was subsequently overshadowed by a long, and only partially understood argument with the proprietor, which meant my next breakfast consisted of a beer and a hotdog at Ljubljana’s central train station. But that is another story.

Two mysteries remain. First, given that most Italians simply couldn’t be bothered with breakfast, why do they run so many of our greasy spoons? Placing responsibility for the most important meal of the day in the hands of a people who generally don’t make it much past a cup of milky coffee strikes me as a bit like putting the Germans in charge of our national sense of humour.

The second mystery - of why Italians google “breakfast” so much - might not be such a three-pipe problem. There is an Italian psychedic rock group called Breakfast.

Their next album is called 'Flowers and Spiderwebs'. And there was me hoping for eggs, bacon, sausage and tomato.