Who Is the Character on the Moka Pot? — The Little Man With the Mustache and the Story of Bialetti

On the kitchen stovetop, an eight-sided pot gleaming in aluminum. Look closely at its side and you'll find a man standing there. A trim suit, a luxuriant mustache, and one index finger raised toward the sky. Anyone who uses a moka pot has wondered at least once: "Who on earth is this guy?"

To put the conclusion first, he's not a fictional mascot. He's a caricature of a real person. And not just anyone — the very man who grew this company into a global brand, Bialetti's second-generation leader, Renato Bialetti himself. In Italy he's called "L'omino coi baffi" — the "little man with the mustache."

1933, an Invention Born at the Washing Place

The story starts with the coffee pot before the character. In 1933, in the small town of Crusinallo in Italy's Piedmont, Alfonso Bialetti, who ran an aluminum workshop, brought the Moka Express into the world. The inspiration for the invention, it's said, came surprisingly from the local washing place. Back then, washing tubs were built so that boiling soapy water surged up through a central tube and sprayed over the laundry, and he carried this principle of "pushing water up with steam pressure" over to coffee extraction.

The "Moka" in the name comes from the Yemeni port city of Mokha. Considered the home of Arabica coffee, it was the city from which the most prized coffee of the day set sail. In an era when huge, expensive espresso machines existed only in cafés, the moka pot opened a new daily ritual under the title of "espresso you drink at home."

The Son, Renato, Makes His Bet

The invention was the father's, but the legend was written by the son. When Renato Bialetti, who inherited the company after World War II ended, began running it, the moka pot was still a local-workshop-level product. The market was already flooded with copycat products. Renato's answer was simple and bold: "Let's make our pot stand out from the others." The means were advertising, and a logo.

In 1953, the Modena-born cartoonist and animator Paul Campani drew a caricature character based on Renato's face — especially that luxuriant mustache no one could imitate. The gesture of one raised finger is exactly the motion of ordering at an Italian bar by calling out "Un caffè! (A coffee!)" The man on the side of the moka pot is, in effect, ordering a coffee at this very moment.

From 1958, this character aired as the animated star of Carosello, the legendary advertising program on Italian state broadcasting. In Italian living rooms of the '50s and '60s, the omino became a familiar face appearing every night, and he remains one of the most beloved icons in the entire history of Italian TV advertising.

Why His Own Face, of All Things?

By today's eyes, a CEO engraving his own caricature on a product might look a bit silly. But at the time it was a clever strategy. First, the aluminum eight-sided pot was a shape anyone could copy once the patent expired, but a face cannot be copied. Only a pot bearing the omino became a mark of trust that it was a real Bialetti. Second, it was the message that "there's a person behind the company." The mustached man was, in effect, the proprietor who guaranteed quality with his own face.

Indeed, the omino became more than a mere logo — it became the very personality of the Bialetti brand. Even after Carosello stopped airing, the character remained right there on the side of the pot, and even after the company left the hands of the Bialetti family — Renato sold it in the late 1980s — it was never once erased.

The Last Story — Laid to Rest in a Moka Pot

The ending of this brand story is more dramatic than any novel. In February 2016, Renato Bialetti passed away at the age of 93. His three children chose, as their way of honoring their father, a one-of-a-kind funeral. They placed his ashes inside a giant Moka Express replica. And on the moka pot that became his urn, of course, the omino coi baffi was engraved on the side just the same.

In a small church in Montebuglio in northern Italy — the village where he was born — a priest swung incense over the moka-pot-shaped urn, and some 200 mourners watched the scene. The moka pot was then buried beside his wife in the family tomb in Omegna. A man who devoted his whole life to the moka pot came, quite literally, to his eternal rest inside one.

The Little Man With the Mustache

Now, when you look again at the mustached man on the side of the moka pot, he'll look a little different. He's the man who pushed his father's invention — born from an idea at a washing place 90 years ago — into the kitchens of 300 million homes worldwide, staking his own face on it. That raised-finger pose is still saying the same thing. "Un caffè!" — So, how about a cup of coffee?

All images in this post use public domain and CC-licensed materials from Wikimedia Commons, with the source and license noted in each caption. The text draws on the Italian Wikipedia (Omino coi baffi), 2016 reporting from CNN, ANSA, UPI and others, and archival material from The Art Post Blog and Zogia.