Bicerin - Caffè al Bicerin

Caffè al Bicerin has operated in the same spot in Piazza della Consolata, next to Turin's Basilica della Consolata, since 1763 — 263 years, by the café's own count. The house drink that gives the place its name layers espresso, drinking chocolate, and cream into a single glass; Umberto Eco, describing it in his 2010 novel "The Prague Cemetery," called the combination one of Turin's "legendary places" and wrote of its "fragrance of milk, cocoa, coffee and other aromas." The drink has a long pedigree of its own: during Lenten fasting periods it was permitted specifically because hot chocolate wasn't classified as food, letting churchgoers drink through the fast.

Count Cavour, the 19th-century Italian statesman, kept a regular table here, and Alexandre Dumas wrote about the bicerin during his travels through Turin. The café itself still looks the part — candlelight, period furnishings, cast-iron columns and capitals, wood paneling set with mirrors, marble-topped tables — and remains family-operated more than two and a half centuries after it opened, now recognized as a member of Italy's Historic Locales register. It's one of the few places anywhere that can point to an unbroken 18th-century recipe, the room it was invented in, and the statesman who used to sit in it.