Nine in ten Italian families own a Bialetti. This is the story of the eight-sided pot Alfonso Bialetti launched in 1933, the Neapolitan flip-pot it replaced, and the designers who couldn’t leave either of them alone.
Naples made coffee in the cuccumella, a pot invented, of all places, in Paris — a tinsmith called Morize patented it around 1820. There’s no pressure involved. You boil the water in the bottom half, flip the whole pot over and let gravity drip it through the grounds. Eduardo De Filippo gave it a whole scene in Questi fantasmi (1946), talking an unseen neighbour through the ritual from his balcony, right down to the little paper cone, the cuppetiello, that goes over the spout to keep the aroma in.
Alfonso Bialetti learned the aluminium trade in France, then opened a workshop in Crusinallo, near Omegna on Lake Orta, in 1919. In 1933 he launched the Moka Express, named after the coffee port of Mocha in Yemen. Water goes in the base and coffee in the funnel, and steam pushes the water up through the grounds into the top. It has eight sides and Art Deco lines, and it was cheap enough for any kitchen.
After the war his son Renato turned the pot into a national habit. From 1958 the omino coi baffi, a little man with a moustache drawn by Paul Campani, sold it on Carosello, the evening advert show that sent Italian children to bed. When Renato died in 2016, his family buried his ashes in a moka pot.
Then the designers got hold of it. Alessi’s first stovetop espresso maker, Richard Sapper’s 9090 of 1979, is all steel, with a lid that locks shut with a lever, and it won Alessi its first Compasso d’Oro. The architect Aldo Rossi followed with La Conica in 1984 and La Cupola in 1988, one with a pointed lid and the other domed. Back in Naples, Riccardo Dalisi spent years on the city’s own pot and made more than two hundred tin prototypes before Alessi put his Neapolitan coffee maker into production in 1987.
A lot of what came next looked south. Gaetano Pesce called his Vesuvio for Zani&Zani (1992) a tribute to Naples, and Mario Trimarchi’s Ossidiana for Alessi (2014) has facets like volcanic stone. The original Moka Express is still in production, octagon and all.
The house rules haven’t changed either. Never press the coffee down in the funnel. Keep the heat low, and take the pot off as soon as it starts to gurgle. Don’t wash it with soap. Rinse it in hot water and let the coffee oils season the aluminium, the way every nonna in Italy will tell you to.