Three Generations, One Machine: The Ferraro Family, Toronto

By Marcus Webb · 8 min read

In the Ferraro household in Toronto's Little Italy, coffee has always been a family language. Nonna Rosa's Bialetti moka pot. Her son Marco's first electric espresso machine in the 1990s. And now, the Arco Doppio that Marco's daughter Giulia placed on the kitchen counter last Christmas, wrapped in paper she had hand-printed with tiny coffee cups because she is twenty-six and still believes in wrapping paper that means something.

Nonna Rosa and the Bialetti

Rosa Ferraro came to Canada from Calabria in 1968, three months after marrying Antonio, who had arrived two years earlier and was working construction in the expanding suburbs north of Toronto. She brought with her a trunk of clothes, a set of linen tablecloths her mother had embroidered, and a six-cup Bialetti Moka Express that she had received as a wedding gift. That Bialetti is still in the family. It sits on a shelf in the kitchen of the house on Grace Street where Rosa, now eighty-three, still lives with Marco's family — weathered, the handle replaced twice, the rubber gasket swapped out more times than anyone has counted. For fifty-six years, Rosa has made coffee the same way. Fill the bottom chamber with water to just below the valve. Fill the basket with finely ground dark-roast coffee — Illy, always Illy, because that is what her mother used and the universe does not require further brands. Assemble, place on the stovetop, wait for the gurgling that means the coffee is rising through the grounds. Pour into small ceramic cups. Drink with sugar — always sugar — and usually with a biscotti that Rosa bakes every Sunday in quantities that suggest she is feeding a village rather than a family of five. The coffee she produces is strong, slightly bitter, and absolutely consistent. It tastes the same today as it tasted in 1968, because nothing about the method has changed. Rosa does not own a smartphone. She uses a landline. She watches Italian television via satellite. The idea of programmable temperature or pressure profiling would strike her as absurd — like buying a machine to tie your shoes. Coffee comes from the moka pot. This is not a choice. It is simply how things are.

Marco's Middle Chapter

Marco Ferraro was born in Toronto in 1971 and grew up drinking his mother's moka pot coffee, which he considered the only real coffee until he was approximately thirty years old. He is an electrician by trade, practical by nature, and not given to enthusiasm about consumer products. In 2001, his wife Daniela — who is from a Sicilian family in Hamilton and has her own strong opinions about coffee — bought a Breville espresso machine from a department store. It cost, Marco remembers, about three hundred dollars. It had a pressurized portafilter, a small steam wand, and a plastic drip tray that cracked within a year and was replaced with one from a different Breville model that did not quite fit. That machine lived on their counter for fifteen years. It produced espresso that Marco considered adequate and Daniela considered mediocre. The crema was thin. The steam wand produced foam that was more froth than microfoam. But it was their machine, it worked, and replacing it was never urgent enough to act on. When it finally died in 2016 — the pump failed, and the cost of repair exceeded the cost of replacement — Marco bought another mid-range machine, this time a DeLonghi with a slightly better build quality. It lasted five years. During those years, Giulia left for university, discovered specialty coffee through a campus cafe in Montreal, and began a gentle but persistent campaign to educate her parents about what espresso could actually taste like. She brought beans home from Montreal roasters. She showed her father videos of latte art. She made him taste a cortado at a third-wave cafe on Dundas Street and watched his face change when he realized the coffee was sweet without sugar.

The Christmas Gift

Giulia saved for seven months. She is a junior graphic designer at a branding agency in Toronto, and her salary does not leave a lot of room for eighteen-hundred-dollar espresso machines. But she put aside what she could — skipping lunches, taking a freelance logo project on the side, selling her old camera on Kijiji — because the Doppio was the right machine for her family and she knew it with the certainty of someone who has done the research. The Doppio is a dual boiler, which means the steam boiler and the brew boiler operate independently. This matters because Marco makes cappuccinos — he steams milk for every drink, a habit inherited from the Italian-Canadian coffee tradition where espresso without milk is considered slightly austere. On the old DeLonghi, he had to wait between pulling a shot and steaming milk, because the single boiler needed time to switch modes and reach steam temperature. The wait annoyed him, though he never complained because complaining about appliances is not something Marco does. The Doppio eliminates the wait entirely. Pull the shot, steam the milk simultaneously, combine. The PID temperature control holds the brew water to within one degree, which produces noticeably more consistent shots than the thermostat-controlled machines Marco had used previously. On Christmas morning, Giulia placed the wrapped box on the kitchen table. Rosa was skeptical — she could see from the size that it was a machine of some kind, and any machine that large was either unnecessary or expensive, possibly both. Marco unwrapped it with the careful deliberation of a man who saves wrapping paper. When he saw the Arco logo and realized what it was, he was quiet for a moment. Daniela cried, which she does readily and without embarrassment. Giulia showed them how to use it that morning, pulling shots for the whole family, steaming milk, making Rosa an espresso that Rosa pronounced 'good, but different' — which, from Rosa, is high praise.

Sunday Coffee, Three Ways

Six months after the Doppio arrived, the family's Sunday morning coffee routine has settled into a pattern that accommodates all three generations. Rosa still makes her moka pot coffee first, around 7:00 AM, because she wakes early and because she will never stop using the Bialetti regardless of what other machines are available. She drinks two cups at the kitchen table while watching a morning program on RAI. Marco comes down at 8:00 and makes cappuccinos on the Doppio — one for himself, one for Daniela. He has, to Giulia's quiet satisfaction, gotten genuinely good at steaming milk. The microfoam is dense and glossy. He has even attempted latte art, though the results are more abstract expressionism than defined patterns, and he claims this is intentional. Giulia, when she visits — she lives in a small apartment in Kensington Market now — makes straight espresso. She uses the Doppio's temperature controls to pull slightly lower-temperature shots from the light-roast beans she prefers, which is a level of adjustment Marco finds unnecessary and Rosa finds incomprehensible. The three coffee preparations happen within an hour of each other, in the same kitchen, from three different approaches to the same fundamental act. Rosa's moka pot. Marco's cappuccino. Giulia's precisely controlled espresso. Nobody argues about which is best. This is not because the Ferraros avoid argument — they are an Italian-Canadian family and argument is a primary form of communication — but because coffee, in this household, has always been less about the drink and more about the making and the sharing of it. The Doppio sits on the counter beside the Bialetti now. Rosa has not used the Doppio and probably never will. But she touches it sometimes when she walks past, the way you might touch a piece of furniture that someone you love chose carefully. The machine is Giulia's gift to her family's coffee story. It is the newest chapter, not a replacement for the ones that came before.

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