My friend John’s sixtieth birthday celebration was stylish and memorable – dinner in the Midland Hotel, Morecambe, with the option of staying for the weekend in Art Deco splendour.
For me, the highlight was when we took his mother, Marjorie, for a morning cup of coffee at Brucciani’s on the seafront.
This celebrated and much-loved Italian milk bar is part of a family concern dating back to 1893 when Luigi Brucciani, aged thirteen, arrived with his family from Tuscany and settled in Barrow-in-Furness, across the bay from Morecambe.
Luigi’s son, Peter, opened the first of two Morecambe milk bars in 1932, followed by the current promenade location, almost next door to the Winter Gardens, the week before the start of World War II in 1939.
As war turned away the holidaymakers and killed the ice-cream trade, Brucciani’s prospered providing Italian coffee to military personnel. After the war, when the holiday crowds and the ice cream returned, so did artistes at the Winter Gardens, including locally-born Thora Hird and Eric Morecambe (né Bartholomew), and Brucciuani’s grew from a milk bar to a café.
In July 2022, the then Prince Charles, as well as unveiling a plaque to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Winter Gardens, popped in to sample Brucciani’s ice cream. He was served vanilla.
Luigi’s great-grandson, Paolo, speaks for his family at Spotlight on Bruccianis | Lancaster and Morecambe Bay.
Brucciani’s sells only their own ice-cream to an Italian recipe in more than a dozen flavours. The décor has hardly changed, and is lovingly illustrated at Brucciani’s – Morecambe – Modern Mooch.
The Preston Brucciani’s, though it retains the name, has repeatedly changed hands since the 1970s: Review: The historic Preston City Centre cafe that fails to live up to its potential | Blog Preston.
When John and I took his mother for coffee at Brucciani’s in Morecambe on a Saturday morning in January 2015, she said that she could remember the place when it first opened in September 1939.
And, she declared, it hasn’t changed.