Five o'clock in the morning, my colleague is already waiting in front of the door with his car, let's go to Milan.

Almost 700 kilometers, we'll make it by lunchtime. Could there be a better opportunity than a trip to Italy to reflect on the career of latte macchiato?

So get on the passenger seat, open your laptop and start writing.

Whereby: without a coffee it will take time.

Now we're almost at Darmstadt - and only one paragraph done.

From the globalization of taste

Alphonse Kaiser

Responsible editor for the department "Germany and the World" and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin.

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This is a story of technical innovations, of the globalization of taste and of a country that finally wants to loosen up.

It took a while for Italian coffee culture to cross the Alps.

It's good when a connoisseur sits in the driver's seat: He had his first espresso machine back in the 1980s.

That was the time when there was no longer just Jacobs coffee, but also Lavazza.

In household goods stores and at Saturn you could suddenly buy Gaggia espresso machines.

The early machines did not have a milk frother.

The milk was whipped up with a whisk, if at all, because there was also cream - and whipped cream!

It's hard to imagine today.

But until well into the 1990s, if you went to a café in Germany and ordered a cappuccino, you got a coffee with thick cream topping.

And if you just ordered a coffee and asked for milk, the waiters would throw packets of condensed milk onto the table.

Condensed milk was introduced 100 years ago, among others by Karl Lagerfeld's father Otto ("Lucky Clover"), because real milk doesn't keep that long and because refrigerators didn't exist yet.

Today there are refrigerators.

And yet those nasty plastic portion packs are still lying around in cafes and bakeries.

In Bologna I learned to love latte macchiato

Why actually?

Because there is latte macchiato, in which milk and coffee and foam combine wonderfully.

And if the "spotted milk" is now also available nationwide in Germany, then it doesn't just have to do with the man in the driver's seat who, as a late 1968 and non-party member of the Tuscany faction, brought the Italian way of life to Germany.

And not just with the Germans in general, who, thanks to gyros, pizza and falafel, opened themselves up to the world of culinary delights.

But also with me.

Because I brought the latte macchiato to Germany.

Call me crazy, but I can say so in all humility.

And that's how it happened: As a student, I used to go to Italy and Spain all the time.

In Bologna I learned to love the latte macchiato.

In Madrid I discovered the leche manchada.

"Discover" is the right word because it wasn't all that common.

They usually brought me a manchado - but that's a "café manchado", i.e. a spotted coffee with just a little milk.

But I always asked for a manchada everywhere – and soon got it without asking in my favorite café behind the Plaza Mayor.

Hombre, how cosmopolitan did I feel, drinking a Manchada and reading “El País”, although I only understood half of both.

So after successfully introducing the manchada in Madrid, I ventured into a much bigger project: Germany.

Since the early 1990s, I've been asking for a latte macchiato at every opportunity, in Munich, Berlin, Cologne, everywhere.

Not even in progressive cafes like the Burkardt in the Untere Strasse in Heidelberg, where my fellow student Eckhart Nickel stood behind the counter, that was already there, only cappuccino and milk coffee.

Even this international student city was deep province.

So the motto in the café on Universitätsplatz until well into this millennium was: "Outside only small pots!"