Its name comes from an eclipse. On 15 February 1961, a total solar eclipse crossed Italy, and Faema — Fabbrica Apparecchiature Elettromeccaniche e Affini, a coffee machine maker in Milan — chose that moment to launch the machine that would carry its date into its name: the E61. It was a fitting christening. Like the eclipse itself, the E61 blotted out everything that came before it in the world of espresso.
Until 1961, every serious espresso machine relied on a manual lever — a barista pulling a spring-loaded piston by hand, pressure rising and falling with the strength of their arm. The E61 replaced that gesture with a motorised volumetric pump, delivering fixed, consistent water pressure at the flick of a switch. It sounds like a small mechanical substitution. In practice it reinvented the category: for the first time, a single barista working alone could pull shot after shot with the same pressure, the same crema, the same result. Within a decade it was Italy's best-selling coffee machine, and the "E61 group head" it introduced — the polished, part-chrome brewing unit on top of the machine — became the template every high-end home and commercial espresso machine still borrows from today.
This two-group example, built in Milan in 1962, is the professional configuration made for busy bars — a machine designed to serve, not just to sit on a counter. Its chrome shell has the sculptural, unapologetic confidence of Italian industrial design at its peak, all rounded edges and mechanical detail treated like ornament. That same instinct — turning a working object into a design statement — runs through other Italian pieces of the era, from the stainless surfaces of the P.R.O.F.A. medical display cabinets from Padua to the polished curve of a Goffredo Reggiani chrome arc floor lamp.
Six decades on, this original Faema E61 two-group still carries the presence it was built with. The chrome holds its shine, the mechanics are intact, and every lever tells the same story: this is the machine that changed how the world drinks coffee, not a replica of it.