Specialty coffee in Alessandria

Alessandria lived off hats for a hundred years. Giuseppe Borsalino opened a workshop here in a courtyard on via Schiavina, and before the First World War his factory was turning out two million felt hats a year and employing more than two and a half thousand people. The family built the town its waterworks, its sewers, a hospital, a sanatorium and an old people's home, and the word borsalino itself entered Italian dictionaries as a common noun. The company went bankrupt before the local court in 2017, but the museum in Palazzo Borsalino still shows every model made since 1857.