An Analysis of the Rise of Italian Coffee Culture

When I moved to Florence in 2005, I had to learn to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of Italian culture. I learned that each shopping bag at the supermarket did not come for free, that trains could be delayed from 10 minutes to 1 hour, that forming a straight line was the least efficient means to get onto the bus. One particular idiosyncrasy came from the coffee culture of Italy. On a regular weekday, it was never a difficult task to get a caffè espresso in one of the hundreds of bars in the city. Yet I discovered on a Sunday that the entire city closed down to observe God's seventh day of rest. On this day, I learned to make my own caffè with the Bialetti Moka Express.

My first attempt was quite a failure. I filled the entire bottom chamber with water, packed the coffee grounds tightly into the filter and turned the stove on a very low flame. I waited ten minutes-no coffee came out. My Calabrian flatmate noticed my difficulty in using the Moka to prepare a two-minute coffee in our kitchen, and decided to teach me the golden rules of the stovetop espresso maker (see image):

1. Do not fill up the boiler (A) completely with water. Rather, fill it up to the safety valve at the 3/4 mark.
2. Add coffee (Illy was a favorite) to the filter (B), but do not pat down the coffee.
3. Start with a medium flame. Wait until most of the coffee has come up to the top chamber (C) and then turn off the fire.

Once I had learned these three rules, I was able to make my own stovetop espresso without fail. This experience was fascinating to me in that the Bialetti product was incredibly mysterious and foreign to me without the instructions of my flatmate, and suddenly became an effortless cooking instrument once I learned the three rules that governed it. The design is not entirely intuitive, yet the coffee-making process is simple. Compared to many modern appliances, the Bialetti Moka Express is incredibly old-fashioned and its standard design from 1933 remains the top seller in Italy today.

In the first section of this paper, I will discuss the historical and cultural context from which the Bialetti design emerged in Fascist Italy before WWII. This shall provide the foundation for understanding the unique coffee culture in Italy that thrives in the cafés and-specifically for this study-in the kitchen. Following that discussion, I will present the variants of the traditional Moka design that have been influenced by commercial goals in the modern era.

The History of the Moka

The creation of the Moka Express can be traced to the rise of its core material: Aluminum. Jeffrey Schnapp traces the simultaneous rise of aluminum and coffee in Italy in "The Romance of Caffeine and Aluminum." While it is important that coffee became a popular social drink in the early twentieth century, I will focus on the development of the aluminum industry and its influence on Alfonso Bialetti's design. The industrial metal came into use in the late nineteenth century, which a mass scope during WWI from 1914-1918. Several years after the first world war, Benito Mussolini came into power with the Fascist Party in 1922. Part of the propaganda promoted during the twenty years of Fascism in Italy glorified aluminum as the national metal. The peninsula was, in fact, rich in the bauxite ore that is the chief source of aluminum.

When Alfonso Bialetti began to work on the rudimentary designs of the Moka, he thus used aluminum to construct the product. By that time, there were two coffee makers in Italy: the napoletana and the milanese. The first was "a reversible pot heated on the stove and then flipped over so that the boiling water trickles down through the coffee" and the latter "in which water is boiled until it seethes through the ground coffee held in a strainer near the pot's top" (Schnapp 250). Bialetti opted for the milanese design that produced coffee in a rising fashion, but incorporated the tiered levels of the napoletana. Bialetti's inspiration for this design goes as follows:

"He becomes intrigued with how local housewives boil their linens in tubs built around a central conduit that draws the boiling soapy water upwards and redistributes it across the linens through a radial opening. Lightning strikes: why not adapt this simple physical principle to coffee making?" (252)

Bialetti created the three-part Moka, though there were several problems with the original design. Coffee did not flow smoothly from the boiler to the top chamber, the boiler was vulnerable to cracking with an unchecked pressure system and wooden handle was not strong enough. With little design experience, Bialetti copied the coffee maker models of luxury designers in Milan, which resulted in the trademark eight-sided shape of the Moka Express.

Once the glitches were smoothed out by 1933, Bialetti had a working model for his stovetop espresso maker. He produced 70,000 coffee makers before 1940, which he sold around the Piedmont region of Italy. When WWII arose in Europe in 1939, the Moka Express remained in stasis in the Bialetti workshop. It was not until 1946 when Alfonso's son, Renato Bialetti, took up the business post-war. Renato revolutionized the coffee industry by trademarking the Bialetti design in 1951, because many coffee companies had begun to manufacture stovetop espresso makers after WWII. The innovative angular design of the Moka Express was therefore protected, and the product grew to be an object of popular culture in Italy from the 1950s to today.

The second important change that Renato initiated was the creation of the Bialetti branding image. In Italian, the omino con i baffiis the "little man with a mustache." This cartoon by Paul Campari was a caricature of the Moka creator, Alfonso Bialetti, who raises his finger to order an espresso as if standing at the counter of an Italian bar. Renato's ad campaign promoted the Moka Express as making coffee at home just as it tastes at the bar ("in casa un espresso come al bar"). This is the essential idea of the stovetop espresso in that one can enjoy the luxury of coffee in one's own kitchen. I will not explore the ramifications of the Italian kitchen in this paper, but we should understand that the kitchen is the heart of Italian culture, because it is the gathering locus of the family for meals. For this reason, the Bialetti Moka Express aimed to reach the Italian user in a way that was highly personal but also organically simple and "very easy to use" (Bialetti Moka Express patent 1951). I would add a qualifier that one must learn the three rules of coffee making before the Moka fulfills its second objective.

The Modern Moka

Without the strong personal connection between the product and its user or designer, the Moka Express would not have received such success over the past half century. The original model pictured on this page has proven to be the highest selling coffee maker of all time. Yet as a manufacturing company, Bialetti has developed variants of the traditional Moka design. The most popular of these are the Brikka and the Mukka Express. The Brikka produces an espresso that is more authentic to the industrial sized machines used in Italian bars. Pressure builds up not only in the boiler, but also in the upper chamber, which creates a slight foaminess in the espresso. The Mukka Express takes its name from the Italian word for "cow" and plays on the original name Moka Express. The bovine nomenclature and visual design of the Mukka Express comes from its special function of frothing milk while making an espresso. The resulting drink is a caffelatte.

On a recent trip to Florence, I was able to visit the Bialetti store and see the newest styles of espresso makers. The two most intriguing designs were the Cuor di Moka and Dama Sound. The Cuor di Moka has a sleeker, rounded shape and heart trinket in the upper chamber that caps the amount of water that rises so that only one cup of espresso is made. When the liquid is poured out, the second espresso can be made. The Dama Sound has a less rounded shape than the Cuor di Moka, but is essentially the same design as the original Moka Express. However, the special feature of this coffee maker is a microchip inserted into the top knob of the object that plays a cell phone ring when the coffee is ready. The Dama Sound reinvents the teakettle for the coffee drinker in the modern era. Because the Cuor di Moka and Dama Sound are relatively new product lines, the sales statistics are insufficient to compare to those of the original model.

One of the most important aspects of the Bialetti coffee maker is that it retains its traditional roots as a stovetop maker. There are a handful of electric machines for the office or dormitory, but they do not sell in as high a volume as the Moka Express. A possible reason for this is that there are also coffee vending machines, equivalent to American soda or food vending machines, in office buildings and on university campuses. There are also more cafés around commercial rather than residential areas in Italy. The kitchen-centric allure of the Moka Express therefore does not apply to the designers who would use an electric model, and it is more convenient to order a one-Euro espresso at a café. Additionally, there is no real difference in the amount of time it takes to prepare an espresso with a stovetop or electric maker. An appliance serves to increase efficiency, as seen in electric egg beaters, microwaves and food processors. However, the Moka Express prepares coffee in about the same amount of time as an electric model.

In this essay, I discussed the historical and cultural conditions surrounding the creation of Alfonso Bialetti's Moka Express. The Moka arose between the world wars and was influenced by Fascist propaganda that promoted aluminum as an Italian metal. Bialetti's inexperience as a designer led him to copy other stovetop maker designs, which became the patented icon of Bialetti and the Italian stovetop espresso. The espresso maker was met with success because it sought to personalize coffee culture in the kitchen. For this reason, the Moka Express has survived completely unchanged over the past 50 years as the top selling stovetop coffee maker in Italy and the rest of the world. While it is clear that Bialetti's Moka Express is unparalleled in sales, the company continues to innovate new designs. The only model that might be able to outsell the original Moka would most likely be a self-cleaning apparatus, which we can only dream of seeing in years to come.

Bibliography

Gallu, Mariacarla, Valerio Sanguigni, Maria Pia Ruffini and Antonio Strano. "Effects of Coffee on Serum Cholesterol and Lipoproteins: The Italian Brewing Method." European Journal of Epidemiology. Vol. 11. No. 1. Unknown: Springer, 1995. 75-78.
Schnapp, Jeffrey T. "The Romance of Caffeine and Alumninum." Critical Inquiry. Vol. 28. No. 1. Chicago: UP Chicago, 2001. 244-269.