An Italian public servant left her office for a morning coffee break with colleagues on a typical workday back in 2009. On her way back to work, she tripped and broke her wrist. For the next 40 days she recuperated at home.

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       That ill-fated coffee break set off more than a decade of legal struggles over whether the fall counted as a workplace injury. After all: What’s a workday without a coffee break — especially in Italy, which prizes its coffee-drinking culture.

       Her insurance company insisted that breaking a bone while on a break meant she had done so on her own time, and therefore denied her claim for work-related compensation.

       On Tuesday, Italy’s Supreme Court weighed in, concluding that coffee-break-related injuries are not workplace injuries, and employers do not have a legal responsibility to compensate workers for any accidents that might occur during them.

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       The outing was “a risk that was taken willingly by the employee” and not a “physiological need connected with her work activities,” the court ruled, according to the Telegraph.

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       Judges also ordered the woman, known only as Rosanna, to pay more than $6,000 in legal costs.

       The plaintiff’s lawyer, Maria Gabriella Del Rosso, said her client was “disappointed and embittered by a decision that took more than 10 years to reach, an absurd length of time,” the Telegraph reported.

       “My client didn’t leave the office to go shopping — she was satisfying a physiological need,” the lawyer added.

       The day of the accident, Rosanna’s employer gave permission to leave the office for caffeine, as there was no in-house coffee machine or canteen.

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       But after she filed a claim, her insurance company, Inail, refused to cover her injury as work-related. Rosanna sued, and in 2013 won her case in a lower court. Inail had to pay her a compensation and disability allowance, the judges ruled.

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       The insurance company appealed. In 2015, an appeals court sided with Rosanna and the initial ruling that the injury was workplace related.

       But Inail appealed once more, this time to Italy’s highest court.

       Twelve years later, Italian workers had a definitive ruling: seek coffee at your own risk.

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