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In the era of planned obsolescence, in 1951, a small metal workshop in Caseros, in the west of the Province of Buenos Aires, began to manufacture a product for daily use to last a lifetime. Although currently 3,000 units are sold every month, more than one person did not need to buy it because they inherited it from their parents or grandparents. The durable and daily use one is the traditional Volturno coffee pot, an Argentinean brand (not Italian, as it is usually believed) created by Antonio Varriale, an Italian immigrant and Antonio Julio Onoda, an Argentinean son of a Japanese father.
"My father was a perfectionist, he always did things right, he never made a provisional arrangement or just in a hurry; he did everything so that even his great-grandchildren would live it. And that way of being is what he transferred to the product and to the company; it was a conviction that he even maintained in times of crisis, even though he could reduce costs; he preferred to make a loss than to make a poor quality product", says his son Adrián Onoda, who runs the company together with his mother Ana María Affonso.
The Moka coffee maker was an invention of the Italian Alfonso Bialetti and since he patented it in 1933 it has become an icon of Italian culture. So much so that when Antonio Varriale immigrated to Argentina, among the clothes in his suitcase he brought with him a Bialetti coffee maker and the firm decision to produce it in the country, taking advantage of the fact that the patent had already passed into the public domain.
The curious origin of the coffee maker's name
The person chosen to join him in the venture was his neighbor and namesake Antonio Onoda, who was a lathe operator and had a small workshop in the back of his house in Caseros. In 1967 Aníbal Dall'Anese, another Italian immigrant and Varriale's relative, joined him and between the three of them they formed the company as an SRL under the name Fábrica Argentina...