Coffee in Europe

In few countries is coffee more entrenched in daily life than Italy. In fact, any cursory glance at a coffee menu reveals this intimate connection between coffee, Italian culture and language. So, if you’ve ever wandered into an Italian kitchen, chances are you’ve seen one of these peculiar coffee contraptions — a Bialetti moka pot. Remarkably, an estimated 90% of Italian households own one (Joshua). And while these clever aluminum devices have slowly fallen out of favour for modern capsule machines, such as Nespresso, embedded in their aluminum design lies an intricate mediation between nationalism, modernity and a surprising remnant of Italy’s Fascist legacy.

A Bialetti moka pot, with its distinctive octagonal aluminum design

When coffee first reached European borders through Greek, Turkish, and Armenian vendors in the 16th century, its early status remained confined as an upper class exotic indulgence. This affluent designation began to fade through the 18th century development of coffeehouses, which radically transformed the social dynamics surrounding the beverage and democratised its consumption. As Jeffrey T. Schnapp, director of the Stanford Humanities Laboratory, discusses in his article The Romance of Caffeine and Aluminum,

The coffeehouse became a site increasingly associated with novelty and news, with present-centered, “modern” activities like the reading of newspapers, with commerce, advertising, the promiscuous mixing of social classes, contemporary culture, and, of course, politics, particularly revolutionary politics (247).

This understanding of the coffeehouse echoes the work of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who posited the coffeehouse as an example of the formation of a public sphere — distinct from traditional spaces such as the home, the church, or state, and integral to the development of democratic societies

Throughout the 18th and 19th century, as public coffee consumption continued to grow, coffee became the alluring beverage of the caffeinated gentlemen — an emerging urbanite embodying the cosmopolitan values of creativity, agitation, hyperstimulation and mobility. And, as the cerebral fuel demanded by modernity, its most undisputed and distinctive incarnation was the café espresso.

Designs for Luigi Bezzera’s early espresso machine.

Entering the 20th century, while caffeine consumption in commercial coffeehouses flourished, domestic production lagged. Coffee brewing still required large industrial steam presses, and innovation had not developed a feasible alternative for domestic coffee. Available alternatives produced a slow and anaemic imitation, an unappealing prospect given the “long-standing conviction that strong coffee was the virile liquor with which modern men powered their corporeal and corporate boilers” (251). Early innovations such as the Napoletana or Milanese lacked the spectacle and excitement of commercial coffee machines such as Luigi Bezzera’s 1901 patent for the Locomotive Coffee Machine (seen above).

Alfonso Bialetti and his Aluminum Casting

After working in France for the first decade of 20th century, Alfonso Bialetti returned to rural Italy and opened a small metal and machine shop. Using an aluminum casting technique he studied in France, Bialetti began working on a coffee machine that eliminated steam infusion, and instead used pressurized hot water to extract caffeine into an espresso shot. And while other larger coffeemakers were developing similar techniques that “focused on costly, large-scale machines made of brass, copper, and steel” (252), Bialetti sought to use a simpler design and a cheaper alloy, aluminum, for a wider appeal. As the original 1951 patent proclaimed, the stovetop espresso machine represented an “organic simplicity, making it very easy to use, and at a more than accessible cost” (253), while never compromising on the strong and powerfully intense cup found in cafés and restaurants.

Benito Mussolini, in power from 1922 to 1943

Rising Fascism and Italian Aluminum

While Bialetti’s decision to use aluminum might have been solely motivated by his familiarity with the alloy, as Schnapp explains,

The context within which Bialetti’s invention came about had rendered aluminum no ordinary metal. From the standpoint of global production and the international market for aluminum, particularly in the domains of transportation, household products, furniture, and architecture, the thirties represent something of a golden age (254–255).

This was particularly evident in Italy, which, driven by Mussolini’s economic self-sufficiency, fixated on exploiting Italy’s rich bauxite and leucite deposits (both integral ores in aluminum processing). As a result, aluminum emerged as the propagandistic metal of his Fascist revolution, a designation that particularly suited Italian Fascism. As Schnapp clarifies, its refinement simultaneously perpetuated cultural narratives of Italian craftsmanship and ingenuity that echoed back to Ancient Rome, while its technological sophistication appealed to turn-of-century modernist imaginations and symbolized the glorious future awaiting Italy under Fascism. As one state-operated industrial magazine proudly proclaimed,

ALUMINUM. An Italian metal, the abundance of which makes us the envy of the world. Thanks to its manifold applications, aluminum is sure to permit us to reduce to a bare minimum the importation of other metals, freeing the Fatherland from the onerous tributes that, to this day, continue to be exacted abroad. Aluminum is the inexhaustible Italian resource. It embodies Italy’s unyielding destiny! (256)

Aluminum’s characteristic lightness, flexibility, metallurgy and strength seduced a grand vision for Italy, and exemplified Italy’s uptopic aspirations. And, in an effort to increase its lagging domestic consumption, Mussolini successfully imposed an embargo on foreign stainless steel (Pirro 22) and implemented a de facto monopoly over the development of aluminum in Italy (Schnapp 255). As a result, the moka pot’s aluminum construction emerges from the political autarchy of Italian Fascism, which glorified aluminum in pursuit of its economic, cultural, and social ambitions. Interestingly, coffee itself become a prominent symbol of Fascist mythology following the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (the indigenous origin of the coffee plant), which Mussolini’s pursued as a colonial vision for reviving Italy’s imperialist past. Therefore, Bialetti’s elegant functionality can be understood, as Schnapp argues, to exist at the crest between caffeine and Fascism — an elaborate interweaving of Fascist modernity, historical Roman revisionism, globalized trade and colonialism, as well as the fervent hyperproductivity of European urbanism.

The Bialetti mascot, called l’omino con i baffi — “the mustachioed little man”

Bialetti and Post-War Expansion

However, the same autarchy that adorned aluminum as an Italian patrimony kept aluminum prices exceedingly high, and Bialetti’s invention remained confined to small weekly public markets. With the reconstruction of post-war Italy, and the rise of consumerism, Renato, Alfonso’s son, was able to use effective marketing strategies and crafted a distinct brand identity (the infamous Bialetti mascot) that enabled the company to flourish economically and culturally. As Schnapp concludes in his article, “There remains a characteristically, yet paradoxical, Italian touch that renders the romance between caffeine and aluminum an enduring marriage between the new and the old” (269). Beginning at the turn of the century, enabled by the rise of Fascism, survived through the defeat of World War Two and thrived in the post-war reconstruction period, Bialetti’s stovetop espresso machine embodies a century of cultural, political, and economic turmoil in Italy. It acts as a fantastic reminder of the inescapable presence of history and the unavoidable power of ideology as it governs our daily lives, beginning even from that first cherished cup of morning coffee.