In Italy, it is a clear sign of a tourist to have a cappuccino after 11 o'clock in the morning. If you are hanging out with Italians, an afternoon coffee is strictly espresso. Most Italians would not dream of drinking a latte after noon either. Cappuccino and latte are considered breakfast drinks.

A cappuccino is made of espresso, steamed milk and milk foam. (Espresso means 'pressed out' – namely through a coffee-making machine invented in Italy at the beginning of the 20th century.)

Cappuccino means 'little hood' or 'little monk's cowl'. Capucchio is 'hood' and -ino is a common Italian diminutive ending, hence 'little hood'. Cappuccino was first the Italian term for a Capuchin friar. The colour of the coffee reminded Italians of the brown robes of this Roman Catholic orders of monks. The Capuchins wore brown robes with pointed hoods. It is said the first cappuccino coffee served had little peaks of milky foam that looked like these pointed hoods.

This borrowing of a formal ecclesiastical term to name something secular and lowly is part of the broad, anticlerical humour that is widespread in Italy. Hundreds of words and phrases mock the Roman Catholic church (for example in the pasta named strozzaprete, 'priest-strangler'). Rome is the epicentre of these sacrilegious quakes. The hypocritical and licentious shenanigans of nuns and priests futtering in the shrubs of la città vaticana have kept the temporarily eternal city laughing for centuries.