Do you remember the time when all a glamorous promotional calendar needed was some shots of a bikini-clad girl standing in front of some tyres? If the Lavazza 2010 ‘Italian Espresso Experience’ calendar is anything to go by, those days are long gone.
Created to promote Italy’s most successful coffee brand, this exceedingly sleek, arch selection of images was recently unveiled in Turin, where the charming Lavazza family presided over an extravagant launch which featured live opera, costumed dancers and an intriguing demonstration of synchronised swimming.
Shot by British photographer Miles Aldridge, the calendar is a polished celebration of all things Italian. Lydia Hearst, Daisy Lowe and Georgia Frost pose for dazzlingly coloured, eerily perfect images based around popular Italian songs.
To illustrate Andrea Bocelli’s Con Te Partiro (‘I’ll leave with you’), for example, a pouting Lowe enjoys a cup of espresso on a deserted breakwater, inconvenient cup-shaped baggage resting at her high-heeled feet. Meanwhile, to accompany 1940s swing number Baciami Piccina (‘Kiss me, little one’), Hearst compensates for a lover’s absence by lolling around a bedroom in her scanties smooching a lipstick smudge onto a host of coffee cups.
While the calendar itself is something of an exquisite puzzle, the choice of Turin for the launch made perfect sense – beyond being home to Lavazza’s headquarters, this beautiful, criminally underrated city in the shadow of the Alps clearly takes its coffee very seriously. One of the first places in Italy to embrace café culture, Turin’s elegant streets, built between the 17th and 19th century, boast numerous delightfully restored historic cafés unbeaten (despite stiff competition) by any other city in Italy. In better-known destinations they’d be packed with tourists daily, but in Turin they form just a welcome, unobtrusive part of everyday life.
In these charming, often lavishly furnished, establishments, coffee is typically served espresso-style — order a caffe latté after 11am and you’ll be marked down as a foreigner, an eccentric, or both. Torinese espresso is less growlingly intense than in Southern Italy, but bracingly strong nonetheless, so if you fancy something a little longer and lighter, try the local speciality of Bicerin. This is a shot of espresso mixed with hot chocolate and topped off with a dollop of whipped cream — chocolate is another one of the city’s strengths. Popular as an afternoon treat, these are generally downed with a few bite-sized pieces of pasticceria mignon, typically Italian confections of sponge and crème patissière that hover on the boundary between cakes and sweetmeats.
While the coffee and cakes in Turin’s cafés are excellent, their pressure-free service (you can dawdle as long as you want) and people-watching opportunities are an equally important part of the experience. Spilling out into arcaded squares, the cafes’ antique bar counters are popular with animated, sharp-suited local businesspeople enjoying a coffee fix, while seated at the tables you often find older women with elaborate, immobile hairstyles discreetly feeding titbits to their miniature dogs. Spending a lazy afternoon in places like this, dipping into a paper or taking in the bustle around you, is a wonderful reminder that there is life beyond your corner Starbucks.
