As a history enthusiast, I have always been interested in stories from the past. I have often heard about the famous chicory coffee drunk in times gone by and the famous smuggling practiced in the mountains between Italy and Switzerland. Driven by curiosity I wondered what the relationship was like between Italians and coffee in the years ago, especially during the wars.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Italy, coffee consumption was widespread only among the upper classes, in bourgeois and aristocratic living rooms; the average Italian didn't drink coffee. When the First World War broke out, it was decided to include 15 grams of ground coffee and 20 grams of sugar in the daily ration of the soldier at the front, a quantity which decreased almost immediately and then disappeared completely or was replaced with substitutes. Coffee was not considered a basic necessity. Following the famous defeat at Caporetto in 1917, coffee was reintroduced to give energy to the soldiers and make them more alert and reactive, this was also possible thanks to the enormous humanitarian and economic aid from the Americans.
In addition to its invigorating power, the coffee ritual for soldiers in the trenches was one of the few convivial moments and respite from the fatigue of the front, a moral stimulus and a source of comfort. Once the war ended, the soldiers returned home and continued to maintain the habit of drinking coffee in the morning, a habit that has continued to this day.
With the advent of fascism we began to talk about autarky and economic self-sufficiency. Starting from the mid-1930s, the coffee drunk by Italians came entirely from the colonies in the Horn of Africa. From the moment Italy decided to take part in the Second World War it became increasingly difficult and expensive to find coffee, only to become impossible in 1941 with the loss of the colonies. It was precisely at this time that coffee substitute drinks produced with: artichokes, barley, rye, malt, chicory and figs began to spread. Always with a view to self-sufficiency, the fascist government promoted the consumption of these products and discouraged or even prohibited the drinking of coffee.
Very little was known about these surrogate products, there were no precise recipes or extraction techniques. They were prepared in a homemade way, from the stories of the elderly it can be understood that they were very watered down drinks, with a bitter taste and obviously without the energy boost of caffeine. To achieve the almost total disappearance of these products we had to wait until the sixties with the economic boom and the diffusion of coffee on a mass level.