“I saw an ‘historical’ espresso machine for the first time in Arezzo in 1988 whilst visiting the oldest antiques market in Italy,” says collector Enrico Maltoni. His interest in antique espresso coffee makers became a labour of love means. He’s written extensively on the subject and exhibited his collection of machines and historical archive of more than 25,000 reference documents and patents worldwide.
Many of the machines in yhe collection were made before the coffee culture boom and the likes of David Bowie and Kurt Vonnegut invited Americans to be a “coffee achiever“.
Theses are gorgeous machines. And the collection includes designs by leading architects and industrial designers: Gio Ponti, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Bruno Munari, Alberto Rosselli, Antonio Fornaroli, Aldo Cibic, Giuseppe De Gotzen, Marco Zanuso, Rodolfo Bonetto, the Castiglioni brothers, the list goes on, Giovanni Travasa, Ettore Sottsass, Enzo Mari, Gianfranco Salvemini, Pininfarina and Giugiaro,
“It was love at first sight when I bought the first vintage coffee machine in my collection, although I knew nothing about how it worked or its history. At that time, my interest was just in the design of the machine and only later did I discover it was a two group Faema Marte model. I got home and started to restore it, helped by Vittorio, a retired technician and fellow citizen of mine and found myself immersed in a completely new world – that I knew I absolutely had to explore. It was difficult, especially at the beginning.”
Enrico began toi look for mroe mchaines. “Nobody knew the names of the models, and it was almost as if their past, their history had been forgotten. I didn’t manage to track down any publications about these machines, so decided to devote my time to researching them. I fell deeper and deeper in love and kept on looking for news and documents about the origins of the Italian-made espresso machines created at the end of the 19th century.”
In the video below, Enrico talks about his collection and shows us around MUMAC, the coffee machine museum on the outskirts of Milan where Collezione Maltoni is on show.
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