The School of Coffee. In Florence, the Italian Renaissance of Specialty Coffee.

Nearly a thousand years have passed since Florence developed the guilds of arts and crafts that contributed substantially to the city’s grand economic development and formed the basis for the blossoming of Humanism and the Renaissance, cultural movements that later expanded to all Italian courts.

Several centuries later, Florence will once again be the cradle of the Italian renaissance of quality coffee. Thanks to the collaboration between Simonelli Group, a manufacturer of espresso coffee machines, and Ditta Artigianale, an Italian specialty roasting company, the School of Coffee is born, a project that aims to grow specialty and quality coffee in Italy. It is a knowledge hub, a place open to exponents of the Italian specialty movement and all those attracted to it with the aim of growing and spreading the culture of quality coffee in Italy and training the professionals of tomorrow.

“At Simonelli Group we take advantage of technology to push us further and further along the edge of the future, but this is not enough,” recalls Fabio Ceccarani, CEO of Simonelli Group SpA. “Because there should be no enterprise that does not think about the environment, society, and people. The collaboration with the School of Coffee ties in perfectly with our corporate mission and our daily commitment to sustainable growth from a technological, environmental and cultural point of view. The great names of the Italian Renaissance, such as Leonardo, had the great ability to know how to combine the scientific and the more human aspects. Similarly, today to grow the coffee culture, it is more necessary than ever to combine technical know-how with expertise. This,” Ceccarani continues, “is the great strength and uniqueness of the collaboration between Ditta Artigianale and Simonelli Group because, by combining their great knowledge and experience on coffee with all our technical and scientific know-how, we are able to offer applied training. Those who attend the coffee school will have a 360-degree knowledge about coffee, extraction technologies, and research. This promise thus has a solid and unique foundation. For several years, in fact, the Simonelli Group platform has been dedicated to education with several and very specific programs on coffee, to technological research with innovations that have improved the way coffee is prepared, and to scientific research, with the exclusive collaboration with the SCA’s Coffee Science Foundation and our research hub that shares the results of the latest research every year and makes its laboratories available. The ingredients for a perfect and fruitful collaboration are all there. And the goal is very high: to give life to the Italian Renaissance of specialty coffee.”

The School of Coffee, in fact, enables circular applied training from the perspective of coffee, technology and research thanks to the know-how, facilities, laboratories and specialists put in place by the founding companies. A new and unique reality at the international level that only two companies such as Ditta Artigianale and Simonelli Group were able to constitute, thanks to their own knowledge and scientific-technological platforms structured in the past years.

Florence is the ideal place for the launch of this ambitious project, which aims to give life to the Renaissance of specialty coffee in Italy. Simonelli Group’s participation in the School of Coffee is also a tribute to the city of Florence itself. “It is a pleasure to return to this beautiful city and offer it, almost 100 years later, a new great project,” said Marco Feliziani, Vice President and Commercial Director of Simonelli Group. “In the 1930s, a special Victoria Arduino (historical brand owned by Simonelli Group, ed.) coffee machine was installed in the historic Fiorentina Stadium: a wall machine with 24 dispensing groups, a true work of art from an architectural and technological point of view. Today we pay homage to Florence with the important agreement with Ditta Artigianale to once again give our contribution to the growth of coffee culture in Italy.”

The School of Coffee is part of a project with an international scope by Simonelli Group. “Innovation and research are core values of our identity,” continues Feliziani. “These values have guided the evolution of our espresso machine and coffee grinders for generations, helping to build our knowledge of coffee. The year 2020 marks the beginning of a new big step for Simonelli group, which has launched a wide-ranging project that lays its foundations on the third corporate asset, along with innovation and sustainability, that of knowledge. The new platform has an international approach and embraces several projects related to quality coffee with offices in Italy, in Florence, and abroad particularly in London and Barcelona, in New York in the United States, and in Asia, in Shanghai and Jakarta where we have launched a series of experience labs. These are real laboratories of experience, training and ideas where baristas and trade operators can meet the Simonelli reality, learn about its brands Nuova Simonelli and Victoria Arduino, the continuous innovations aimed at winning all together the new challenges that the world of coffee is preparing to experience. The Nuova Simonelli “Experience Labs” are areas of expression of coffee in its globality, reference points for chains and establishments, for experts and enthusiasts, where we also look at new coffee-based menus according to recent market trends. Victoria Arduino’s “Experience Labs” allow people to immerse themselves in the deeper culture of coffee, now represented by venues and baristas dedicated to the specialty sector.”