Specialty coffee in Milan: 23 checked cafés

The word espresso was first applied to coffee at the Milan fair in 1906, next to a machine Luigi Bezzera patented and Desiderio Pavoni knew how to sell. Bezzera was not tinkering with flavour, he was tinkering with time: he was a factory owner and wanted to cut short the coffee breaks his workers were taking. So the removable portafilter, the same one a barista locks into the group for every shot, came out of an employer's impatience, not out of any love of the drink. Pavoni assembled those machines one a day in a workshop on via Parini, and it was he, not the inventor, who made money off the name.