"Pleasure Makes Us Human" is the 2026 Lavazza Calendar

04-12-24 • CORPORATE

The Italian spirit revealed in the 2026 Lavazza Calendar, "Pleasure Makes Us Human", is vivid, authentic and full of shared moments. Now in its 34th edition, the project has become much more than a window onto Lavazza’s creativity, growing into a visual narrative that spans different periods, languages and sensibilities.

With the 2026 Calendar, we continue the story launched globally by Lavazza’s campaign of the same name, choosing to describe the features that make the Italian way of life unique and distinctive.

To develop the project, we brought in the unique vision of Alex Webb, a member of the prestigious Magnum Photos agency and one of the world’s most original contemporary street photographers, renowned for his compositional talent and colour awareness, and the creative direction of Armando Testa, the advertising agency with which we have a built a consolidated partnership based on successful global campaigns.

The launch in Miami

This edition of the Calendar was launched on an outstanding stage: for the first time, we presented the project to the public at Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the world's most important modern and contemporary art fairs and a true crossroads of cultures, ideas and artistic influences.

Lavazza’s role as official partner at the event strengthened the brand’s deep ties with the art world and especially photography, offering a unique opportunity to present the Calendar at an event with global reach, to a diverse international audience of enthusiasts, collectors and gallery owners.

The photographs

Alex Webb’s photographs tell the story of a Grand Tour through Italy: a journey in twelve stages that creates a warm and intense visual narrative, designed to explore different nuances of pleasure. They aren’t postcard images but places that express the authentic Italian way of life, where every stage reveals a different side of humanity. And they are accompanied by a cup of coffee of course, more prominent than ever in this year's photographs, adding the ‘punctuation’ that brings expressiveness to every moment.

Alex Webb, master of colour and shade

Born in 1952 in San Francisco, Alex Webb is one of the world’s best known street photographers and has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1979. His interest in photography began during his high school years and he went on to study photography at the Carpenter Center for the Arts. He joined Magnum Photos in 1974, when he started working as a photojournalist, and became a full member of the agency in 1979. During this time, he documented small-town life in the American South, using black and white photographs as his medium, and then transitioned to colour when he arrived in the Caribbean and Mexico, an experience that marked the start of an intense period of discovery. Since then, colour has been a key feature of his work.

Webb had this to say about the 2026 Lavazza Calendar: “I tried to follow the light, colours and movements of people, capturing images that convey a certain level of energy and resonance. As a photographer, I tend to see beauty, art and pleasure even in small gestures and simple moments, like sipping a cup of coffee.”

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