Southern Europe's Best and Worst

Table of Contents

• Coffee
• Transit
• Urban Life
• Food
• Visitability and Livability

Coffee

• Lisbon: Good 👍
• Seville: Bad 👎
• Madrid: Okay 😐
• All of Italy: Extremely bad 🤢

I can’t overstate how appallingly bad the coffee in Italy was. I committed to trying lots of it in hopes of figuring out what makes people like Italian coffee. Before running out of patience, I had maybe six cappuccinos, six americanos, and three espresso shots at Italian coffee shops¹. Only one of those drinks was even tolerable. Every coffee is burned to an absolute crisp and tastes more like ash than anything else. I can’t even understand what someone would like about Italian coffee except that it’s “strong”, in the sense that the flavor is truly overpowering. But the flavor isn’t really coffee, and that’s really illustrated by the tradition of giving a spoon (to mix in sugar) with your drink.

The worst part is that no one has modernized to anything resembling even second wave coffee. I’m sure there’s a lot of cultural attachment to traditional espresso methods since Italy is associated with the creation of modern espresso. But it’s resulted in a whole country where it’s nearly impossible to find anything even in the same league as Starbucks.

Spain’s coffee was a mixed bag. I didn’t try much in Granada or Barcelona, but Seville was almost as bad as Italy. Some of the coffee was similarly burned and overpowering, some more watery. Madrid was fine: with some research, I found decent coffee there pretty reliably, but most random cafes were still bad.

In Spain and Italy, the median cup of coffee is what I’d consider “really bad coffee” in the US, noticeably bad even for something bought at a bakery or grocery store, and well worse than commodity staples like Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s. Even Starbucks in those countries seem to serve worse coffee than Starbucks in the US!

Lisbon was an amazing surprise though. I had several very good cups of coffee without even seeking them out, along with the best coffee I had in Europe (and some of the best I’ve ever had) at Orioli Coffee. Lisbon’s average quality might be on par with Chicago, but with much higher variance.

Transit

I came to Europe knowing that Spain and Italy are considered international leaders in intercity rail, so I was extremely excited to check out the high speed trains. And they didn’t disappoint.

In both countries, the trains between cities are frequent and incredibly fast. They seemed faster in Italy and were definitely nicer there as well, but the ones in Spain were still more than adequate. They weren’t cheap though: most of my trips were €40-90, which really isn’t much cheaper than the budget airlines in Europe. But the experience is vastly better than flying since there’s less security, bigger seats, and a reasonably generous luggage allowance.

I didn’t travel within Portugal much but did discover that you can’t get from Lisbon to Spain by train. Instead, you have to take a 6.5 hour bus ride to Seville. This was mystifying and frustrating, because it’s only a 4.5 hour drive and a train could likely go even faster. From what I’ve read though, European rail just isn’t as developed across national borders.

I was also optimistic, though slightly less so, about the urban transit. But here I was somewhat disappointed.

Madrid and Lisbon had impressive systems that were clean, timely, and easy to use. Madrid’s was a bit slow and I sometimes found walking to be a faster option, but it was still useful.

I found Seville, Florence, Rome, and Naples all frustrating though. The first three just didn’t have enough metro lines to actually get you anywhere except a handful of places. And Naples was confusing and difficult to use. Admittedly, of these, only Rome’s metro population is over 4 million so maybe it wasn’t realistic to expect a vibrant transit ecosystem in the others.

The big question though: how did these places compare to Chicago?

Mostly better. All were much cleaner. There weren’t any cases of trains just not showing up, as they occasionally do in Chicago. No one was smoking on the trains, no one was lying asleep across two seats, and no one was screaming profanity and intimidating passengers. They felt safe and reliable. And even the most confusing system, Naples, was staffed with people to help you navigate the ticketing system. In Chicago, no attendant is ever going to help you do anything.

But on the other hand, I now appreciate the scope of Chicago’s system more. Our trains cover much more area than any city I visited except Madrid, and they often cover the distance faster. The problems with the Chicago system are mostly fixable things: policing, cleanliness, and consistency.

Urban Life

I had two main observations about life in European cities.

The first is the safety. Particularly in Spain, it’s truly remarkable to watch the comfort with which people walk alone at night. In Seville especially, it was normal to see women turning down dark alleys alone. In all the places I visited, people were just much less concerned about being out at night than they would be in a major US city.

The difference this makes in livability is enormous. It makes cars less necessary because you can walk to the store, even at night. It makes it easier and cheaper to socialize because you can take the metro to bars or walk home alone. It makes cities feel more vibrant because you see people around, even late at night. And that likely creates a virtuous cycle, with more eyes on the streets leading to even more people venturing out at night.

Honestly, it’s confusing to an American because it’s not clear why we can’t have this. I don’t think guns can really explain it; a knife is sufficiently threatening to rob someone at night. These countries do have almost double the police per capita as the US, which surely helps, but it’s not like I saw a policeman on every corner. I don’t have an answer but it’s a desirable thing that we should work toward in the US.

My other big observation was that it’s extremely slow to walk anywhere. This was a little surprising to me since Americans tend to idolize Europe as the gold standard of walkability. But in most places, it could take as long as 30 minutes to walk a mile (as the crow flies) because of the random street angles and the wacky intersections that take several minutes to cross. Rome was by far the worst offender in this regard, and I found my time navigating the city really unpleasant.

Some other thoughts:

• Ubers were extremely cheap in Spain (50% the price in the US, I’d guess) but expensive to the extreme in Italy (maybe 2x or 3x the US price). Between the slow walking, the limited transit, and the expensive Ubers, I found Italian cities a real nightmare to get around.
• The density of bars, restaurants, and cafes is remarkable. That sector must employ a huge portion of the population. And yet, paradoxically, it can often be difficult to get a table because everyone eats meals in the same two hour window (and many restaurants are closed outside of these narrow permissible-eating times).
• The bathrooms across Europe are terrible. I found them less bad in these countries than in some others (looking at you, England) but it’s so normal in a bar to find a missing toilet seat, a bathroom without a sink, or a toilet without any obvious mechanism to flush it. It’s frustrating and gross.
• The plaza/piazza model for public spaces is pretty but probably not the best use of space. In many cities I visited, it was normal to find tens of very similar plazas throughout. Yes, people can gather here, but there’s very little seating and nowhere for kids to play games that need grass. They often have nice statues in the middle but as with a lot of things in old Europe, all those plazas with statues look pretty much the same. Parks would be equally aesthetic and far more practical.

Food

Prepare yourself for some unpopular opinions.

The food was very bad on this trip. I certainly had a few good meals, but I was eating out two or three times a day, and if I’d done that in the US I would have had lots of tasty, memorable dishes.

I’ll start with Spain. Food was noticeably cheaper than in the US and that was great. Alcohol is even cheaper, in some cases literally cheaper than water (yeah, you pay for water). Tapas are fun and economical, but they are repetitive; you’ll be tired of nuts and fried potato-things after a few days. Regular Spanish food was meh, and most of my good meals in Spain were imports (Peruvian chicken, for example). I’m not sure I spotted a vegetable at any point in a Spanish restaurant.

The food in Italy was more complicated. It was pricier – pretty comparable to the US. I am a known Italian food hater, and indeed even in Italy, it felt like constantly eating the same three ingredients in different forms. Even so, the food was better than in Spain. I had a couple of pastas that were decent and even some salads, but nothing memorable.

Italian pizza, though, was a spectacular letdown. Roman pizza in particular was awful, just burned bread with some sauce. Naples pizza was better but far too much bread and too little cheese. Nothing held a candle to New York style pizza, and I honestly even prefer Chicago style over anything I found in Italy.

I haven’t mentioned Portugal and I don’t really have strong opinions. The most famous dish in the country is a Pastel de Nata, a small eggy pastry. It’s perfectly fine but nothing remarkable. I went out of my way to try seafood in Lisbon and some was okay, but I didn’t go anywhere especially well-regarded either² so I’m not in a position to render a verdict.

The worst thing about the food in these countries, by far, was the breakfast. In every city I visited, the only thing you can reliably find for breakfast is pastries. In the rare case you find a place with “sandwiches”, they’re actually just croissants cut in half with one piece of salami and one piece of cheese inside. This sounds like an exaggeration because it’s absurd but it’s actually true. You pretty much can’t get a healthy breakfast, and the average option is probably about as nutritious as a toaster strudel … but less tasty.

Visitability and Livability

I had a great time on this trip and there’s no place I regret going, except maybe Mallorca. But some places were more worthwhile than others.

Based on everything above, it will come as no surprise that I don’t like Italy. It’s dirty and hard to get around. I hated the coffee and didn’t much like the food. The ancient ruins still make Rome worth visiting, but I wouldn’t bother going anywhere else except maybe Pompeii as a day trip. I would even recommend skipping all of the Vatican-related things in Rome, as those look exactly like all the other church art in Europe.

Spain I liked a lot though. Southern Spain (Seville and Granada) were probably the most pleasant cities to visit, being small and clean and cheap but full of culture and history. The mood of Southern Spain is also just really upbeat.

I had a pretty neutral feeling on Barcelona, but I’d need more time there to understand it. The neighborhood where I stayed was near most of the tourist attractions, but still felt very dead. And there really aren’t a lot of famous things except for the architecture of Antonio Gaudi, so I found it less interesting to visit than other cities.

I liked Madrid a lot, though more for its livable feeling than any particular attractions. I had a great time just exploring the city and doing “normal” stuff, like riding the metro and running on the river trail. Of all the places I visited, only Madrid holds up as somewhere that I could imagine living. It’s large (metro pop 7 million), well cheaper than Chicago, sparkling clean, and pretty warm even in winter. (Supposedly it doesn’t usually rain much, but I had bad luck.) The metro is very good and the urban design is outstanding. Overall, a great city!