Is "Cafeé und Thée Logia" partly Italian?

Question

There has been a discussion of the phrase "Cafeé und Thée Logia" seen in a C18(?) picture on the German Language Stack Exchange. None of the words is a modern spelling in any language except und which is German for "and".

So far we have got:

Cafeé looks more like French café than Italian caffè but the Académie française derives café from Italian caveé, caffé. Cafeé looks half way in between.

Und is German for "and".

Thée looks like the French thé but this seems to have been the early spelling in Italian as the Italian tè comes from French. The second e is unexplained.

Loggia is Italian from Latin, and is usually spelt with gg, at least in Latin, Italian, French and German:

Wikidata item English: loggia, French: loggia, German: Loggia, Loggien, Afrikaans: Loggia, Belarusian: Лоджыя, Belarusian: Лёджыя, Bulgarian: Лоджия, Catalan: loggia, Czech: lodžie, Loggie, Danish: Loggia, Emiliano-Romagnolo: Lóśa, Esperanto: loĝio, Spanish: logia, loggia, Estonian: Lodža, Loggia, Basque: Logia, Loggia, Finnish: Loggia, Gan (Traditional): Loggia, Galician: Loggia, Hebrew: לוג'יה, Hungarian: Loggia, Armenian: Լոջիա, Ido: Lojio, Italian: loggia, logge, Japanese: ロッジア, 開廊, 涼み廊下, 涼み廊, Georgian: ლოჯია, Kyrgyz: Лоджия, Latin: Loggia, Norwegian Bokmål: loggia, Dutch: loggia, Polish: Loggia, Portuguese: lógia, logia, loggia, Romanian: Logie, Russian: Лоджия, Slovak: Lodžia, Loggia, Slovenian: Loža, Swedish: Loggia, Ukrainian: Лоджія, Chinese: 涼廊,

Can someone with a knowledge of old spellings in Italian please say if these are valid Italian spellings and, if so, from when? And if eé is valid, what is the é for?

Answer 1

The only occurrence I could find of a spelling similar to cafeé in an Italian text is caveè, in a report by 16th-century cardinal and ambassador Gianfrancesco Morosini, as quoted in Le relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato raccolte, annotate ed edite da Eugenio Alberi (1855). Speaking about Turks after his mission in Constantinople, he wrote in 1585:

Quasi di continuo stanno a sedere, e per trattenimento usano di bere pubblicamente, così nelle botteghe come anco per le strade, non solo uomini bassi ma ancora de' più principali, un'acqua negra bollente quanto possono sofferire, che si cava d'una semente che chiaman Caveè, la quale dicono che ha virtù di far stare l'uomo svegliato.

More or less: They, both high- and low-class men, continuously drink in bars and streets a boiling-hot black water obtained by a seed they call Caveè, which they say keeps men awake.

The 19th-century editor annotates that it is the first time an Italian writer mentions coffee, using its Turkish name, “cahveh” (apparently, the modern Turkish spelling is kahve).

So, technically, at least an Italian writer (almost) used that spelling to designate coffee. It seems, however, that it was just a tentative first version that didn't take root, while subsequently only versions more similar to caffè or café were used. For instance, the authoritative dictionary of the Accademia della Crusca includes caffè since its third edition, published in 1691 (where it appears in the Giunte, Addenda, while in subsequent editions caffè appears as a normal lemma).

As for tea, the spelling of its name is quite uncertain even in modern Italian, so I assume some leeway may be possible for past centuries, where orthography was still in progress. Nowadays vocabularies record two or three spellings (Treccani, for instance, takes tè as its lemma, and lists as “less common” spellings the and thè). I can find the version Theè in late-17th-century text:

Si parla finalmente della Beuanda del Theè, e si espongono le sue Virtú singolari; Si mostra, che i tartari Orientali la beuanda del Theè formano col'latte, e sale ...

(They talk about Theè drink and its singular virtues; Oriental Tartars make it with milk and salt.)

Again, I can't find other occurrences (other ones in Google Books turn out to be other languages, among which Latin, or artefacts due to OCR). Crusca records just tè (giving the as its Latin form) only from its fourth edition (1729-1738). (Earlier lemmas refer to homographs.)

Finally, I can't find anything for logia, and my instinct suggests me that it is a misspelling (or local, not widespread spelling) by either a foreigner or a Northern Italian, but I can't find a definite answer.