Episode Details

Giovanni Giotta was born in 1920 in Rovigno d'Istria, a fishing town that was part of Italy before World War II and now belongs to Croatia. After the region was ceded to Yugoslavia he lived as a displaced person in Monfalcone from 1947 to 1951, then emigrated to San Francisco with his family, arriving with no money, no food, and nowhere to sleep. Priests at Saints Peter and Paul Church found a family to house them and got him a job washing windows, where he sang opera arias over the traffic.

Homesick for the cafés of Trieste, a Habsburg free port since 1719 where James Joyce and Italo Svevo wrote, Giotta took over the Piccola Cafe on Vallejo Street in North Beach in 1956 and renamed it Caffe Trieste. His first customers were Italian neighbors, and the cappuccino became his bridge to Americans raised on instant coffee. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti treated it as a place to sit for hours, and Francis Ford Coppola wrote significant portions of The Godfather screenplay at its tables, earning it the nickname the living room of North Beach.

• Giotta hosted live opera performances at the café on Saturdays.
• In the 1970s his sister Yolanda fed the penniless poet Jack Hirschman for about six months; Hirschman later became San Francisco's poet laureate and celebrated at the café.
• Franchise locations opened in Sausalito, Berkeley, Oakland, and Monterey.
• In 2016 Caffe Trieste was named a San Francisco Legacy Business, the same year Papa Gianni died.
• By 2017 family disputes had erupted, and the Berkeley and Oakland locations cut ties and changed their names.