The Old-School Italian Coffeemaker That Still Has Fans Today

If you watched the opening ceremony of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in 2026, you might have seen a parade of multicolored coffee pots dancing their way across the arena. They were electric coffee makers known as Moka pots, and Italy has every right to be proud of them. But if you venture further south from Milan, you'll end up in Naples, where a particular kind of old-fashioned coffee pot, called a Neapolitan coffee pot or cuccumella, is still in use.

While a Moka coffee maker prepares its coffee using steam, a cuccumella uses nothing more than the power of gravity. Here's how it works: You add coffee grounds and water into the corresponding chambers of the pot, then place it on a hot stove with the spout facing down. Once steam starts to emit, you flip it and smack it down against the counter. Over the course of a few minutes, the coffee will drain through the filter and collect at the bottom of the pot. Sounds a little involved, no? But if you'd rather not try any of these 12 instant espresso brands (helpfully ranked from worst to best), it's fun to give yourself a little project.

You might expect that a coffee maker popular in Naples (and which is sometimes called a napoletana) would have been invented there. But in fact, many sources claim that the cuccumella was invented in France by a tinsmith named Jean-Louis Morize in 1819. (This is not to be confused with French press coffee, which you really should use with the proper coffee ratio.) It did catch on in Italy, however, where it was used regularly into the 20th century. It became especially popular as an at-home option once Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini placed a tax on espresso machines in public bars as part of a strategy to discourage gatherings where resistance could foment.

Today, the more modern Moka pot sees more use across Italy, but that doesn't mean the cuccumella has disappeared entirely. There are still some holdouts who prefer to make their coffee the old-fashioned way, because there are few things Italians love more than traditional cuisine. (So a common Italian food myth would have you believe, anyway.) If nothing else, it affords a pretty rare opportunity to fully flip over a kitchen appliance, lending the experience an appealing physicality. Imagine if we could fry food more efficiently by picking up the air fryer and shaking it like a piggy bank!