In the beginning, it was nothing more than a dream. But it was a dream that became reality.

Back in the 1990s, Maurizio Cimbali - the president of the Cimbali Group - visited the Il Mercante in Fiera (one of the largest antiques fairs in Europe). One of the stands he visited belonged to Enrico Maltoni (link a pg dedicata a Intervista a Maltoni), a passionate collector of vintage espresso machines. “I remember seeing a Cimbali Granluce and a Faema E61,” recalls Cimbali. “It was testament to a shared passion for the culture and history hidden in a coffee cup.”

The opportunity to make the dream a reality manifested itself a few years later, when Cimbali wanted to do something that would both celebrate the company’s centenary and stand the test of time. The whole Cimbali family was in agreement: “We’d been producing coffee machines for 100 years, so if we weren’t going to set up a coffee machine museum, nobody was. It was the perfect opportunity.”

A unique collection

MUMAC is a corporate museum permeated with a rare passion for history, customs and the exquisite machines it houses. The collector Enrico Maltoni is the beating heart of that passion. “For me, MUMAC is the realisation of a dream I’ve had since I was an 18-year-old lad visiting a antique market,” admits Maltoni. There is no other collection like it in the world. MUMAC shows just how fascinating an object the coffee machine is, from both an aesthetic and technological standpoint. But above all, the coffee machine captures the evolving styles and innovation associated with one of the most popular drinks in the world.

On top of that, the Cimbali Group’s coffee machine museum is also a real asset to the brand’s communications strategy, spanning LaCimbali, Faema and Casadio. For MUMAC is much more than just a huge collection of coffee machines. MUMAC is also the product of an ambitious architectural and industrial reclamation project, a journey of discovery marked by 100 machines displayed in six rooms, a whistle-stop tour through over a century of industry, technology, design and Italian production.

The exhibition space starts in the early 1990s, in a room designed to resemble the Art Nouveau cafés typical of Fascist Italy, before journeying through the Italian economic boom and the birth of a new way of life encapsulated by the café scene before reaching the heyday of Italian design in the 1960s and 1970s. The story continues with the globalisation of the 1980s and 1990s, culminating with the introduction of innovative, hi-tech models in the new millennium.

A multi-functional space

The museum also holds a huge amount of material, multimedia content and archive documents, to the extent that one of the largest libraries on the coffee industry in the world was recently opened within MUMAC Academy, meanwhile, works to promote coffee culture, training and research. MUMAC also hosts a diverse range of initiatives and is the ideal location for corporate events. It is a great venue for meetings and collaborations with institutions and business from the local area, across Italy and throughout the world. MUMAC also forms part of the communications strategy underpinning the Group, supporting corporate projects and brand activities as well as backing up initiatives designed to encourage sustainability and responsible innovation.

All of this makes MUMAC a vibrant snapshot of a production sector renowned around the world as a symbol of Italian culture and excellence in Italian production.