t-shirt Café Margherita • Le sardine

manifesto

Coffee was first introduced to Europe in 1500; just a few decades later, Venice alone had more than 200 coffee shops, and the trade spread quickly to Padua, Turin, Rome and Naples too. But it was especially in Daniel Defoe’s London that the coffee shop craze truly flourished: citizens – aristocrats, literati, philosophers and politicians first, followed by the general public – went to cafés to converse, gossip and share ideas and opinions. Café owners made a point of providing their customers with the latest “news papers,” as well as occasional pamphlets on current events, and handwritten bulletins available for purchase. Publishers proliferated, and Defoe considered it a crucial moment for debate: political opinions were shaped over coffee cups. 

All of this is the inspiration behind Café Margherita – events in cafés and wayfaring objects, 100% Italian-made and springing from Edizioni Margherita’s publications, an independent publisher of coffee table books and collectable limited-edition magazines. Timeless, visually striking objects to cherish, designed to foster physical and virtual community and inspire conversations about aesthetics through the power of words and photographic images. 

want to wear nature? 

Our literary café’s first objects are 100% Supima cotton t-shirts created in collaboration with Back Label – The Wellnesswear. This Bergamo-based B Corp produced exclusive, timeless clothes for sport and leisure from high-quality natural fibers like organic cotton, milk-protein fiber, seaweed cellulose, bamboo, eucalyptus, and Cariaggi and Jaipur cashmere, handcrafted into fabrics in Italy. These fibers are exceptionally breathable and sumptuous to wear. So our t-shirts are lightweight, incredibly soft and comfortable, even on the hottest days. They’re a caress for the body that’s beyond compare. Stop wearing plastic!

Our t-shirts are designed by Alessandro Tizzi, the artist who created the watercolor for the first issue of Mntn Journal (Edizioni Margherita), and feature four images: 

– sardines, shining silver between sun and sea; 

– tomatoes, the star ingredients in Italian dishes, hence in every station the train stops at; 

– the striped beach chair that “veniva dal mare” (came from the sea), as Lucio Dalla sang; 

– the sun, because “with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, it can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do” (Galileo Galilei). Turn your face towards the sun and the shadows will fall behind you (Maori proverb). “For who would place this lamp of a very beautiful temple in another or better place that this wherefrom it can illuminate everything at the same time? As a matter of fact, not unhappily do some call it the lantern; others, the mind and still others, the pilot of the world. Trismegistus calls it a ‘visible God’; Sophocles’ Electra, ‘that which gazes upon all things.’ And so the sun, as if resting on a kingly throne, governs the family of stars which wheel around… IN THE CENTER OF ALL RESTS THE SUN (Nicholas Copernicus)”.