Specialty coffee in Livigno

Before coffee became a holiday souvenir in Livigno, it was a commodity carried over the mountains at night on people's backs. The spalloni ran it, along with sugar and tobacco, over the Foscagno pass in bricolle - woven packs weighing more than thirty kilograms - because in Italy those goods were subject to duty and state monopoly, while on the Swiss side they were cheap. Smuggling here was not a fringe activity but what whole families lived on, and it ended only when exchange rates took the point out of it. A valley that for decades drank coffee that existed in no register at all now sells it legally for less than the rest of the country.