One of the most pleasurable aspects of spending time in Italy is learning to appreciate the neighbourhood bar. Playing much the same role in Italian life as the pub does in Ireland, the bar is the place where Italians escape the daily grind, even if for only a minute or two, chatting with friends, the barista or even random strangers about the weather, politics and the all-consuming obsession, calcio.
Of course, the bar is also where Italians go to feed their addiction to caffeine. But much like the Irish and a pint of stout, the Italian would always much prefer to knock back an espresso in company than alone. In a famous movie scene, the much beloved comedian and actor Massimo Troisi (perhaps best known to Irish audiences for his Oscar-nominated role in the 1994 movie Il Postino) memorably highlighted his fellow Neapolitans’ love of coffee and their passionate sociability.
Sneaking into an elderly neighbour’s apartment, he discovers a coffee pot designed to make only one cup. This, he declares, is the height of solitude. In other words, what is the point of owning a coffee pot if you are unable to make coffee for your friends and family?
The coffee pot Troisi finds in his neighbour’s house is the smallest version of the instantly recognisable moka, an object found in most Italian kitchens. Invented by Alfonso Bialetti in 1933, the history of the moka reflects that of Italy in the pre- and postwar years.
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Born in Piedmont in 1888, Bialetti emigrated to France as a young man where he spent 10 years working in the foundry of an aluminium factory. Upon his return, he set up his own factory producing aluminium goods. But it was not until 1933 that he hit upon the idea of the moka after watching women washing clothes in a machine called a lisciveuse.
The lisciveuse was a metal pot with a large hollow tube located in the centre. When it was heated, the boiling water would rise through the tube dissolving the lye and evenly dispensing the liquid over the clothes within. Bialetti watched the process carefully and decided to apply it to coffee.
Bialetti came up with a simple three-part design. A bottom part or boiler into which the water was poured, a filter which held the ground coffee and an upper part into which the liquid was forced. For the upper part, Bialetti employed an eight-faceted design which endures to the present day.
Bialetti’s Moka Express or macchinetta (little machine) was an instant success. As one slogan put it, Italians could now make “an espresso at home just like the bar’s”. Bialetti’s use of aluminium was particularly apposite, coming at a time when the Fascist government had declared that the metal would be central to the country’s economic development.
The moka looked shiny, new and futuristic, everything Mussolini and the Fascist ideologues liked. Coffee advertising too came to reflect many of the regime’s attitudes to race and the place of women in the home. By the time of Italy’s entrance into the war, Bialetti was producing 10,000 pots a year, selling them at local fairs and markets.
It was after the war, however, that the moka really took off. When Alfonso’s son Renato returned from a German prison camp, he set about producing the moka on a mass scale. Scarred by wartime shortages, many Italians ensured that their homes were well-stocked with such staples as sugar and coffee. During the period of unprecedented economic growth in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Bialetti company began to shift millions of units a year and the moka became as recognisably Italian as the Fiat 500 and the Vespa.
Inevitably, many imitators entered the markets, and so, Renato Bialetti decided to place the emblem of a small mustachioed man on the pot to ensure that the company’s products could be readily identified.
Once a ubiquitous presence, the moka is now in decline; George Clooney and a certain capsule-consuming coffee machine have seen to that. But the Italian passion for coffee remains.
The great Neapolitan playwright and filmmaker Eduardo de Filippo perhaps captured it best in a celebrated monologue from one of his plays. The setting is the balcony of a house in Naples. Having reflected on the nature of a Neapolitan’s relationship with coffee and his own particular method of making it, de Filippo pours a tazza from his freshly brewed pot and smiles contentedly at the audience, “See how little it takes to make a man happy: a cup taken quietly outside with a friendly neighbour across the way.”