If you watched the opening ceremony of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in 2026, you might have seen a parade of multicolored coffee pots dancing their way across the arena. They were electric coffee makers known as Moka pots, and Italy has every right to be proud of them.
But if you venture further south from Milan, you'll end up in Naples, where a particular kind of old-fashioned coffee pot, called a Neapolitan coffee pot or cuccumella, is still in use. While a Moka coffee maker prepares its coffee using steam, a cuccumella uses nothing more than the power of gravity.
