If there is an official breakfast on Procida, this is where it is had. The Bar Dal Cavaliere is the island’s historic bar and pastry shop, on the harbour front at Marina Grande, and on a Sunday morning the counter is a ritual: you go in, you take a lingua, the tongue-shaped pastry, and you come out to eat it watching the ferries. It is not a place for tourists that has adapted itself to Procidans; it is the other way round.
What to take at the counter
The lingue di bue, the ox tongues, are the speciality the place is known for: elongated puff pastry, crisp, with sugar granella on top, and three fillings — classic custard, lemon cream, chocolate. The lemon version is the one that tells you about the island, because it comes from the local limone pane; if you take only one, take that one.
Then there is the frollicella, which is a house speciality and which you will not find elsewhere: a crumbly shortcrust base, a creamy filling. It is the cake ordered by the people who have been coming here for twenty years, which is usually the best indication there is.
One practical piece of advice about the lingua: eat it as soon as you have it. The pastry does not hold for long, and after half an hour in a bag it is not the same thing. Taking five of them home to Naples inside a ferry is an idea that seems good at eight in the morning and is not at eleven.
From trattoria to pastry shop
The place began in the Fifties as a trattoria and was later converted into a pastry workshop: it is a trajectory that makes sense on the island, because those are the years when Procida stops being only a town of sailors and starts to have a harbour front with passing customers. Pastry is the trade that has held up best: while the restaurants open and close, this counter is still in its place.
It is also why the lingua di Procida is worth a stop here: on the origin of the pastry the sources diverge — some trace it back to the shape of the "ox tongue", another to the place name of the Spiaggia della Lingua, the Lingua beach — but nobody argues about how central it is to the island’s breakfast.
How to use it in a day on Procida
If you arrive on the first ferry, this is the first sensible stop: you are a few steps from the landing, you have breakfast standing up and you set off round the island with something already in your stomach. If instead you are about to leave, it is the last thing to do before the ticket office — but without a bag to take home, for the reason given above.
On the harbour front, a short distance away, are the other two names that count for breakfast: Bar Roma, the historic home of the modern lingua, and Paname’, the bakery that works all year. Doing all three over two mornings is the best way to understand how much the same pastry can change over two hundred metres.
In the evening it changes trade
After sunset the bar becomes a cocktail bar, with live music. It is a double life common on the islands, where a single place has to cover breakfast and the aperitivo, and here it works: you are on the harbour, with people passing and the ferries coming in. If you are after more of a lounge bar evening, on the same seafront there is Bar Capriccio, open until 2:00.
On prices and ratings you will find no numbers on this page, and that is deliberate: I have not been able to verify them from reliable sources and I prefer an empty field to an invented figure. The address too circulates in two versions — Via Roma 42 or Piazza Marina Grande — but it is the same frontage on the harbour: you cannot get it wrong.
