Coffee, for us, isn’t a drink. It’s an excuse — and like all good excuses, both sides already know what’s really being said. We’re a couple born, raised, and still living in the historic center of Naples, and this site is where we write down everything we know about it: not the postcard version, but the one we actually live every day.
Who we are
One of us is an anthropologist by training, so coffee gets studied here the way any other human ritual would: who offers it to whom, what it means when a mother-in-law asks “shall we grab a coffee?”, why the water always comes before the cup. The other is genuinely obsessed with coffee itself — the blends, the grind, the crema, the difference two extra degrees of water temperature makes. Between the two of us, that’s the whole site: the ethnographic eye and the sensory expertise.
We also have the privilege of working professionally with the heirs of Luciano De Crescenzo, the writer who brought caffè sospeso to the world, and of helping protect his cultural legacy. It’s one of the reasons the story of Neapolitan coffee feels less like a hobby to us and more like a responsibility.
How we actually drink it
This is the part food blogs tend to skip, so here it is in full. One of us takes it in vetro, amaro — in a small glass instead of a cup, unsweetened. It wasn’t always that way: sugar was the default for years, until doing the math on ten coffees a day, one packet each, added up to over a kilo of sugar a month. That was the end of that. The other takes it bitter and long; a third house style is short and macchiato — not foamed, just a splash of cold milk, closer to a mini cappuccino than anything Instagram-friendly.
At home the moka never really stops. We own seven of them, from the single-cup size up to the 24-cup giant that comes out for big family lunches, and a moka is never washed with soap — only rinsed. The cuccumella, by contrast, comes out rarely: ours belonged to my grandmother Enza, from the 1950s, and we mostly reach for it in summer, when there’s more time to sit with friends. When we travel, the moka comes with us, along with a bag of our everyday coffee, Caffè Kosè — hard to find abroad, so Kimbo is the reliable stand-in. My father, for what it’s worth, is the household’s reigning master of the cuppetiello.
We’re not above instant coffee either: on the road we’ll happily drink Nescafé, and we like Starbucks too — just don’t call it coffee in front of us.
Why this site exists
We’re not food bloggers who spent a week in Naples and wrote up their notes. We live here. We go bar to bar, brew the original methods ourselves, taste the blends, and write down what we actually find — including the parts that don’t flatter the postcard version of the city. If you’ve read this far, you already know we’d rather get a detail right than make it sound impressive.