Armando Maugini served as the director of the Italian Colonial Agriculture Institute in Florence from 1924 to 1964. He was also the chief technical advisor to the Ministry of Colonies during the occupation of Ethiopia. Because of this work, he became the centre of an influential network of agronomers abroad, connecting scholars from São Paolo to Addis. Maugini also wrote prolifically, authoring over 20 books on the agronomy of tropical climates and founding an agricultural journal, L’agricoltura coloniale.

Though the periodical supposedly focused on the East African Servizi Agrari dell’Eritrea e della Somalia Italiana, contributing agronomists relied on Brazilian exemplars to build a framework for Eritrean and Somali crops. First, agricultural scaffolding linked the New World to the Old through tropical plants. Then, it repurposed colono coffee farming knowledge for Fascist dreams of empire.

[…]

Given that the Italian Fascist régime invaded East Africa, the birthplace of coffea arabica, one might expect coffee consumption in Italy to rise, with an influx of coffee beans from the Ethiopian interior. But in fact, the opposite happened. Advertising evoked coffee harvesting in Harar, Ethiopia, but importation records show that the vast majority of beans continued to come from Brazil. Moreover, overall coffee consumption actually decreased. The decrease was the ironic result of the [Fascist] invasion of October 1935.

Emperor Haile Selassie spoke out against Italy’s unilateral imperial aggression at the League of Nations, who responded with a raft of trade sanctions from November 1935 to June 1936. Although coffee was not listed among the forbidden exports, fewer ships arrived in [Fascist] ports, resulting in less foreign importation overall (League of Nations, 1936). The Fascist régime responded with vehement propaganda against foreign foods, with particular vitriol for British cuisine due to that nation’s central rôle in the sanction authorship.

Though never as popular in Italy as coffee, afternoon tea quickly became potum non grata. Ethiopian‐produced hibiscus tea, called Karade, provided an autarkic alternative to teas from the British plantations in India and was ubiquitous in the period’s advertising.

In the 1935 edition of Dalla Cucina al Salotto, domestic doyenne Lidia Morelli went so far as to add an introductory letter to claim regret that her publishers had not had time to edit her description of té alle cinque to comply with linguistic autarky. In sum, the sanctions not only shaped the sources for Italian caffeine consumption, they also changed the total amounts. Curtailed imports drove coffee consumption down by almost 50 per cent, to 0.8kg per person per year, just under half a cup of coffee a day.

With the League of Nations curtailing imports, why was that half cup of coffee made from Brazilian beans? As cited by Jeffrey Schnapp, a coffee advertisement for Cirio — a major food brand — from the year of the invasion and sanctions explains why: ‘Brazil is a great friend to Italy[;] it hasn’t observed the sanctions and purchases Italian products[;] 2 million Italians live in Brazil’ (Schnapp 2001).

In fact, many of those Italians had relatives who continued to work the Brazilian coffee plantations until the late 1930s. Cirio’s slogan ‘Fresh and smells like a rose’ evoked the brand’s advanced distribution networks: a good smell not only meant a superior bean, but also their patented pneumatic closure and swift shipping speeds. In a sense, the [Fascist] invasion primed the Italian market for more Brazilian beans than ever before. In 1937, Cirio financed a series of advertisements in connection with Domus, the popular architecture magazine.

Palm trees, beach umbrellas, and bathing suits introduced Italian housewives to a new summertime treat: caffè brasiliano ghiacciato, or iced coffee (Fig. 2). Brazilianness figured prominently in Cirio’s iconography of coffee. Green, yellow, and blue colour the ‘Ordem e Progresso’ flag in a January 1937 Domus advertisement. Cognate complements ‘Delizioso squisito aromatico saporoso’ speak to both Italophone and Lusophone consumers. Visually, they create the steam rising from this coffee cup.

In the February continuation of the series, soft ochre and pale pinks soften the Rio sunset over the Pão de Azucar ‘sugarloaf’ mountains behind a beautiful coffee drinker. As Emanuela Scarpellini has pointed out, ‘coffee figured prominently in the mythology of empire and autarky: of empire because Ethiopia, the nation [that the Fascists] had invaded was a major producer of Arabica coffee beans; of autarky because Brazil refused to follow sanctions imposed by the world community and continued to furnish Italy with its coffee beans’ (Scarpellini 2016).

At stake in the [Fascist] invasion of Ethiopia and Brazil’s subsequent flouting of the League of Nations sanctions lay the groundwork for cross‐associations between Brazilian and Ethiopian plantations in the minds of Italian coffee drinkers. [Under Fascism], a majority of Italians were aware of East African coffee but almost no one was drinking it. Cultural blurring began.

(Emphasis added.)

At first, one would expect Ethiopia to become Fascist Europe’s new coffee source, but the venture failed. Native resistance remained almost ubiquitous throughout the Fascist era, and the native plantations proved to be more fruitful than the few plantations that the Fascists set up and operated:

Didactic materials drawn from the Italian Colonial Agriculture Institute’s agricultural courses for future colonialists reveal an internal tension between two mutually exclusive goals for Fascist empire in Ethiopia: high coffee yields and [Fascist] plantation oversight. Therein lay the problem: Ethiopian‐run plantations produced more and better coffee. This fact negated a key justification for [Fascist] empire. How could the régime claim to be conducting a civilising mission in Africa if their coffee plantations lagged behind local production?

Reading government documentation against the grain suggests that colonial agronomers introduced rationalist farming to enhance output — gridded rows, planned planting dates, extensive signage. These moves are not all that surprising. What is surprising is the fact that they continued to celebrate rationalist techniques despite extensive evidence that they did not work. And yet, using rationalist farming was so important to agronomers that they even introduced it to successful Ethiopian‐run plantations, resulting in coffee of poorer quality and lesser quantity.

The performance of control mattered more than enhancing the product yield. What was deemed rational was not in fact logical. […] By January 1940, the Gallo Sidamo region housed only two settlements comprised of 55 case coloniche of 50 hectares each. In sum, the total area for coffee plantations run by Italian farmers totalled a mere 2,300 hectares. Even with the additional 25 capitalist coffee concessions, this still totalled only 32,000 hectares of [Fascist] cultivation.

Yet, as the span of Armando Maugini’s career implies, some trends strongly linked to Fascism managed to survived the Fascist era:

An outdoor sign with Spanish text shows the seminatrice again, and advertises ‘El mejor del mundo’, further confusing questions of language and nationality. Although the interior design has been refurbished, the imagery of the harvester has been part of Tazza d’oro’s branding from its opening in 1946. Put another way, this colonial image was actually created after the Fascist period ended.

The seminatrice’s postwar dating speaks to the persistence of these images even into the present day. In the case of the caffè’s motto, the imperial sentiment not only persisted but actually intensified. The original slogan voiced coffee beans: ‘I come from around the world, I go around the world’. Today’s motto is, ‘In every cup of coffee is a journey, in every sip a new conquest’. > […]

Today, the interwar coffee triangle continues to inform the agricultural models for Ethiopian and Brazilian coffee farming, as well as the aesthetics of transnational caffè culture. In terms of the former, the Agro‐Forestry System attempts to mimic the original Ethiopian coffee harvesting style. […] In a bizarre modern corollary, colonial products like coffee and sugar remain vehicles for Italian far‐right politics today.

In 2015, a strange trend swept through northern Italian bars, wherein right‐leaning baristas ordered Fascist‐themed novelty sugar packets from Mussolini’s birthplace in Predappio (Fig. 10). Dubbed ‘caffè nero’ by the press for the black Fascist voting card colour, the practice remained a journalistic novelty, fortunately never rising to the status of a true cultural phenomenon. Nonetheless, these sugar packets demonstrate how Fascist foodways can re‐emerge, zombie‐like, long after they are assumed to be culturally dead.

---

Click here for events that happened today (May 29).

1931: A Regio Esercito firing squad executed Michele Schirru (a citizen of Imperial America) for intent to murder Benito Mussolini.
1937: The pocket battleship Deutschland lost thirty‐one sailors and 101 took injury.