<P> The 17th century French traveler and writer Jean Chardin gave a lively description of the Persian coffeehouse scene: </P> <P> People engage in conversation, for it is there that news is communicated and where those interested in politics criticize the government in all freedom and without being fearful, since the government does not heed what the people say . Innocent games...resembling checkers, hopscotch, and chess, are played . In addition, mollas, dervishes, and poets take turns telling stories in verse or in prose . The narrations by the mollas and the dervishes are moral lessons, like our sermons, but it is not considered scandalous not to pay attention to them . No one is forced to give up his game or his conversation because of it . A molla will stand up in the middle, or at one end of the qahveh - khaneh, and begin to preach in a loud voice, or a dervish enters all of a sudden, and chastises the assembled on the vanity of the world and its material goods . It often happens that two or three people talk at the same time, one on one side, the other on the opposite, and sometimes one will be a preacher and the other a storyteller . </P> <P> In the 17th century, coffee appeared for the first time in Europe outside the Ottoman Empire, and coffeehouses were established, soon becoming increasingly popular . The first coffeehouses appeared in Venice in 1629, due to the traffic between La Serenissima and the Ottomans; the very first one is recorded in 1645 . The first coffeehouse in England was set up in Oxford in 1650 by a Jewish man named Jacob at the Angel in the parish of St Peter in the East . A building on the same site now houses a cafe - bar called The Grand Cafe . Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, established in 1654, is also still in existence today . The first coffeehouse in London was opened in 1652 in St Michael's Alley, Cornhill . The proprietor was Pasqua Rosée, the servant of a trader in Turkish goods named Daniel Edwards, who imported the coffee and assisted Rosée in setting up the establishment in St Michael's Alley, Cornhill . </P> <P> From 1670 to 1685, the number of London coffee - houses began to multiply, and also began to gain political importance due to their popularity as places of debate . English coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries were significant meeting places, particularly in London . By 1675, there were more than 3,000 coffeehouses in England . Pasqua Rosée also established the first coffeehouse in Paris in 1672 and held a citywide coffee monopoly until Procopio Cutò opened the Café Procope in 1686 . This coffeehouse still exists today and was a popular meeting place of the French Enlightenment; Voltaire, Rousseau, and Denis Diderot frequented it, and it is arguably the birthplace of the Encyclopédie, the first modern encyclopedia . In 1667, Kara Hamie, a former Ottoman Janissary from Constantinople, opened the first coffee shop in Bucharest (then the capital of the Principality of Wallachia), in the center of the city, where today sits the main building of the National Bank of Romania . America had its first coffeehouse in Boston, in 1676 . </P>

Where were the first european coffee houses opened