La Marzocco: How a Florence Workshop Engineered the Modern Cafe

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The heavy metal espresso machine on the counter of a specialty cafe very often carries the name La Marzocco. The company began in Florence in 1927, when brothers Giuseppe and Bruno Bambi opened a mechanical workshop. Giuseppe had trained as a brass artisan with the Italian national railway, and he knew steam boilers. Early machines were tall vertical towers that hid the barista from the customer. In 1939 the brothers patented the horizontal boiler, which evened out brewing temperature and, almost by accident, let barista and customer look each other in the eye.

This episode follows nearly a century of problem solving, from thermal stability to wrist injuries to pressure profiling. It covers the 1966 Arno flood, when the company sent technicians to repair any brand of machine for free, and the dual boiler design that gave roasters the confidence to roast lighter. It ends with a factory in Scarperia that still builds every machine by hand and a 2024 deal that paired the brand with its philosophical opposite.

• The GS series of 1970 separated coffee brewing from steam with two boilers and welded the group head to the coffee boiler so hot water circulates through it by convection.
• Kent Bakke secured U.S. import rights in 1978, and his company supplied Starbucks from around 1988 until the chain moved away from the machines around 2004.
• The KB90's straight-in portafilter cuts wrist strain by up to 12 times, a response to the repetitive injury known as barista wrist.
• The Strada X weighs espresso in the cup with scales in the drip tray and adjusts a magnetic drive gear pump on each group from 0 to 12 bars.
• De'Longhi paid roughly 374 million dollars to combine La Marzocco with Swiss super-automatic maker Eversys, keeping separate management, factories, and brand identities.