A tale of two Italian cafés

by Charlotte Penelope Tosti

Caffettino and Captain Corelli’s are two Italian-owned cafes on Battersea Park Road. Both serve an excellent cappuccino. They lie merely a few doors down from each other and together form a strange timeline of Italian migration to Britain.

I was first introduced to Corelli’s’ by my Australian-Italian friend Lydia Di Stefano, who lived just across the road in 2019.

“Being far away from my family in Australia, it was lovely to have a taste of home nearby”, she told me. “It was like going to my mum’s house - somewhere where you could pop over when you wanted some home-style Italian comfort food.”

Inside Corelli’s, the walls are lined with framed photographs of famous Italians, from Marlon Brando to Frank Sinatra. Behind a perspex screen at the counter, you’ll find cutlets, grilled vegetables, pasta, meatballs covered in tomato sauce, all of which can be heaped onto a plate for an affordable, hearty meal.

The TV in the corner permanently shows Italian shows and Serie A matches. Voices converse loudly in a charming mix of Mezzogiorno dialects laced with vaguely cockney English, where words bounce from one language to the other then back again. It’s a vernacular I know well from my father’s mother, who migrated to Britain from the south of Italy at the end of the 1950s.

In almost every sense, Corelli’s encapsulates the taste and sounds of the older, post-war wave of migration from Italy. As grandchildren of post-war Italian migrants, both Lydia and I resonate with that particular vision of Italy.

But Corelli’s isn’t reserved to older Italian migrants and their descendants. It is a welcoming home for everyone who comes in. Helen Mirren, once a regular, praised Corelli’s in 2001 as “ like being in someone's kitchen that they've decided to make into a living room.”

When I spoke with Corelli’s founder, Pasquale Corelli, I was quite literally welcomed into his living room. “Londoners are well-educated, open people who always treated me well”, he said. “In fact, I don’t think there’s a better group of people than Londoners”.

Pasquale migrated to Britain from rural Lazio in 1965 “to work, and make money”. He started out making gelato, and eventually set up the restaurant in the early nineties.

Pasquale arrived in the middle of a large wave of migration of Italians to Britain that lasted from the end of the war to the mid 1970s. These migrants arrived from the agricultural south of Italy, driven away by the lack of work and the devastation wrought by war. Most of these migrants were hired in labour-intensive brickworks and in factories in towns like Bedford and Peterborough.

Travelling back to Italy was expensive. Plans to retire back home were often shelved by the settling down of their offspring in Britain. Language barriers and remaining anti-Italian sentiment in the aftermath of war stymied integration [1]. In the end, food became the middle ground for those who missed home but couldn’t get back. This is where Corelli’s “living room” feeling comes from.

Pasquale is proud of his business, but laments that “it’s a struggle to hire younger Italian cooks that know how to make decent Italian food. So it’s important to hand things down, to teach.”

“I’m 82 and everyone says I need to stop [working] for my health, but as there’s work to be done here,” he says with a little grin, “I’m going to work for another five years.”

Drawing a smile with his hands, he adds, “I want to die back in my hometown with a smile on my face.”

Caffettino, just a two-minute walk up the road, feels different.

You won’t find framed stills from The Godfather or La Dolce Vita here. It looks not unlike any bar you’ll find in Italy. In the mornings you’ll find a fresh ciambellone, an Italian breakfast staple, on the counter alongside some pastries. On evenings from Thursday to Saturday you can sit outside and enjoy an aperitivo, with all the accompanying olives, salumi and stuzzichini you would be blessed with in Italy.

Laura Ferrarotto, who runs Caffettino with her brother, Giuseppe, arrived from Sicily just twelve years ago.

“We opened this place up to bring a piece of home to London - the cappuccino and cornetto for breakfast and an aperitivo after work”, she said.

These are characteristic dishes of modern Italy, food that in the 1960s - as I am often reminded by my own grandparents who live in rural, central Italy - was not as widely diffused across the country as it is today.

“Lots of recently migrated Italian expats come here for an aperitivo, but we get lots of English clients too, especially at the grocery store”, she added.

The pandemic could have brought the end of Caffettino, but the Ferrarottos turned it into a new opportunity instead. “Giuseppe helps transport high quality Italian ingredients from Milan to restaurants here in London”, Laura said. “When the lockdown hit, we realised that people would probably spend more time cooking at home, so we turned the adjacent space into a salumeria named Genuino, selling high-quality meat, cheeses and pasta you get in restaurants.”

The selection of food is impressive: homemade Sicilian fennel sausages, mortadella tartufata, cheeses from every corner of Italy. Genuino feels less like your average Italian salumeria and more like an upmarket grocery store, one that would sit well not just with Italian expats, but also with the yuppies of nearby, affluent Clapham. Unlike Corelli’s, it isn’t quite the spot where you could get away with leaning over the counter and nattering for twenty minutes.

Its sleek interior is a reflection of the Ferrarrottos’ firm focus on professional growth and their place in a newer, younger group of Italian migrants. The wave that brought them to Britain began after the 2008 financial crisis. These Italians, who arrived in the UK with the advantage of having learnt English at school, fled a dried-up job market back home and, aided by Britain’s then membership of the EU, easily found work in London in the hospitality sector.

Gradually, the new Italian migrants became young professionals who wanted to move to London for career development [2]. Nostalgia for Italy is not as salient for more recent arrivals like Laura [3]. Departure from their homeland was fuelled less by economic necessity than by ambition, and cheaper travel means Italy feels less far away.

Caffettino and Captain Corelli’s diverge in their visions of Italy. Corelli’s Italy is nostalgic, located in the migrant experience of not being able to go back home very often. Caffettino’s Italy is a cultural offering to a London that is hungry for the best gastronomic experiences. Still, aspiration is what unites them.

When my grandfather left rural Puglia to go find work in the UK, he took a branch of his family’s fig tree with him. That little branch has grown into a tree that still sits in my grandmother’s garden today. I always saw it as a symbol of being uprooted yet fighting to grow somewhere new.

Though they seem so different from one another, Corelli’s and Caffettino are manifestations of the same fig branch. An attempt to grow roots on new land, while always revering the fruit that grew back home.

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[1] Scotto, G. (2015). From ‘emigrants’ to ‘Italians’: What is new in Italian migration to London? Modern Italy, 20(2), 153-165. doi:10.1080/13532944.2015.1032231

[2] Ibid.

[3] The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture, edited by Roza Tsagarousianou, and Jéssica Retis, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central