📜 History · 1926
From 'sandwich' to tramezzino: Turin, 1926
How a café in Turin invented Italy's crustless triangle sandwich, and how a poet named it.
The English sandwich reached Italy in the 1800s; Pellegrino Artusi already mentions sandwiches in his 1891 cookbook. Its Italian identity, though, began in Turin. In the mid-1920s Angela Demichelis and her husband Onorino Nebiolo came home from America and took over Caffè Mulassano on Piazza Castello. A brass plaque in the café today credits Angela with inventing the tramezzino in 1926.
These were soft, crustless triangles of white sandwich bread with generous fillings, served with the afternoon vermouth. At the time, Fascist-era Italy was trying to replace foreign words, and the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, a regular at Mulassano, is credited with the new name. 'Tramezzino' comes from 'tramezzo', meaning 'something in between'. By 1935 the word appeared in Alfredo Panzini's Dizionario moderno.
The tramezzino later became a staple of Italian bars and train stations, and is especially loved in Venice, where it's eaten as a cicchetto. In 2026 Caffè Mulassano celebrated its 100th anniversary.
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