Tomoca Coffee House in Addis Ababa is a lasting reminder of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. When I visited, almost 10 years ago, a somewhat ancient machine was producing terrific cups of espresso for a huge crowd, and they were doing a roaring trade in beans too. Tomoca is in some ways a symbol not just of Ethiopian coffee, but also of the Italian connection and, at one remove, of the way that coffee ties Italy and Ethiopia to Brazil.

Diana Garvin, an historian, recently published a paper that examines what she calls the Italian coffee triangle. She explains how Italy’s belated land grab in Africa sought to transform the colonos of Brazil, the 2.7 million immigrant Italian labourers who effectively tripled Brazilian production in a decade, into respectable colonialisti in Ethiopia, Italians who owned and oversaw coffee plantations in Ethiopia. Although their Fascist-inspired duplication of Brazilian methods utterly failed, still, Africa had a powerful hold on the Italian imagination.

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