La Dolce Vita resurfaces in Palermo: Scafidi's shots and the tale of an era

A different Palermo, of which perhaps memory has also been lost. A city that, for a brief and unrepeatable stretch of the 20th century, was the landing place and set of the great international stars and others. Grace Kelly striding through the city with regal measure, Sophia Loren catalysing gazes without the need for a stage, Marcello Mastroianni seeming to belong to Palermo as much as the sea or the noble palaces. In those years, the city did not play a role: it inhabited it.

It was Nicola Scafidi, one of the great interpreters of Italian photojournalism of the second half of the 20th century, who captured that suspended, elegant and yet everyday atmosphere. Those shots, long kept in the family archives, were fished out by his son Pucci and today become the protagonists - we can say with certainty - of a photographic exhibition promoted by Morettino, which brings back to centre stage a visual heritage that can still speak to the present. And they recover a memory that has been shelved if not forgotten. "It is a profound and almost moving joy for me to be able to combine the name of my father, Nicola Scafidi, one of the masters of Italian photography, with the historic Sicilian coffee roasting company Morettino," says Pucci Scafidi. "Palermo Dolce Vita" is the beginning of an artistic journey that, in collaboration with Morettino, will develop throughout Italy. A journey that will accompany the public towards the centenary of Nicola Scafidi's birth, a milestone that I wish to honour by bringing to light the intensity of his gaze and the poetry of his images. Seeing his photographs converse with the world of coffee, a symbol of conviviality, tradition and family roots, is like rediscovering an invisible thread linking generations. It is a gesture of love towards our history and towards Palermo, which my father recounted with delicacy and truth'.

The exhibition "Palermo Dolce Vita. Il mito di un epoca negli scatti di Nicola Scafidi", open to the public free of charge until 31 January, is also an opportunity for Morettino to launch The Italian Grand Tour, a coffee collection dedicated to the cities of the Dolce Vita: a capsule collection consisting of seven coffee blends dedicated to Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Capri, Taormina and Palermo. The tins, inspired by tourist posters from the 1950s, are not designed as simple packaging, but as narrative objects. Each blend translates an idea of city and time of day in a sensorial key, recomposing the ideal Grand Tour journey in contemporary form.

The exhibition is conceived as a diffuse itinerary between the Morettino Caffè Palermo at the Quattro Canti, reopened in 2024 in the historic Art Nouveau space overlooking the city centre, and the Morettino Lab at the Palermo Marina Yachting, part of the waterfront redevelopment project. On display is a selection of shots that portray the happy and cosmopolitan Palermo of those years: the arrival of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier, the faces of Sophia Loren, Ingrid Bergman, Burt Lancaster and Marcello Mastroianni, private parties in aristocratic palaces, concerts, walks in the city's symbolic places, from the Mondello beaches to the Foro Italico. Photographs that tell of an Italy that mirrored itself in the future with confidence and that the world looked at with admiration.

Behind this cultural operation, however, is a well-defined industrial structure. Founded in 1920 in Palermo, Morettino is today a roasting company that has been able to transform its history into competitive leverage. The company has a turnover of around €12 million, employs around forty people and operates in several channels: food service, gourmet retail and e-commerce. In the last ten years, it has strengthened its national presence, being distributed in about 500 coffee shops in Italy, with significant presidia not only in Sicily but also in Milan, Rome and Venice.