There is a chair in a barbershop in southern Italy that once cradled the head of the most dangerous man in America.
It’s a Koken chair, hydraulic, made around 1910 — the kind with the porcelain base and leather upholstery that you see in old photographs of American barbershops. This one crossed the Atlantic twice. It went from a factory somewhere in the Midwest to a shop in Prohibition-era Chicago, and then, years later, it travelled back across the ocean to a small hilltop town in the province of Foggia, where it still sits today, gleaming under the strip lighting of the oldest continuously operating barbershop in the world.
The town is Bovino. The family is Scapicchio. And the story begins in 1820.
A Dynasty Written in Lather
When Marco Scapicchio opened his first barbershop in Bovino in the early nineteenth century, the profession carried a weight that is hard to imagine now. Barbers in southern Italy were not simply men who cut hair. They were barber-surgeons: community figures who performed bloodletting, extracted teeth, applied leeches, and served as informal physicians for people who could not afford a doctor. In a town perched on the slopes of the Daunia mountains, miles from anywhere that might reasonably be called a city, the barber was one of the most respected men in the village.
Marco passed the trade to his son, and his son passed it to his. Each generation refined the craft and deepened the family’s roots in Bovino. But it was the generation born in the late 1800s that would take the Scapicchio name across the world.
The Ten Barbers of Al Capone
Around 1900, Vincenzo Scapicchio — Marco’s grandson — did what millions of southern Italians did at the turn of the century: he left. He boarded a ship for America and made his way to Chicago, where he opened a barbershop and began building a clientele among the city’s Italian community.
Then Prohibition arrived, and with it, the reign of Al Capone.
The story, as the Scapicchio family tells it, is this: in 1919, one of the most powerful figures in Chicago’s underworld commissioned ten Italian barbers — all emigrés from the south — to develop a shaving ritual worthy of the city’s elite. The idea was to create something that went beyond grooming: a ceremony, a performance, a statement of power and refinement that could be offered to Capone’s inner circle and to the wealthy patrons of the era’s speakeasies. Vincenzo Scapicchio was among the chosen ten.
Together, these barbers crafted what would become the foundation of old-style Italian shaving: the preparation of the skin with steamed towels, the careful stropping of the straight razor on leather, the precise architecture of the lather, the unhurried geometry of the shave itself. Every gesture had a purpose. Every movement was choreographed. It was grooming elevated to the level of ritual, and it became wildly popular among Chicago’s politicians, industrialists, and entertainers.
For a decade, Vincenzo shaved some of the most famous — and infamous — faces in America. And then, in 1930, with the Great Depression tightening its grip and Capone’s empire beginning to crumble, he packed his razors, his leather strops, his sharpening stones, and his beloved Koken barber’s chair, and sailed home to Bovino.
Coming Home
It takes a particular kind of man to leave Chicago for a hilltop village in the Daunia mountains. But Vincenzo Scapicchio was not running from anything. He was bringing something back.
He reopened the family barbershop on Corso Vittorio Emanuele and began to practise his American-perfected craft on the men of Bovino. The Koken chair from Chicago took its place in the centre of the shop. The techniques he had refined in the speakeasies of the Roaring Twenties — the hot towels, the meticulous blade work, the almost meditative slowness of the ritual — were now offered to farmers, shopkeepers, and schoolteachers in a town of a few thousand souls.
His son followed him into the trade. And then his son’s son. Each generation absorbed the method and added its own sensibility. The grandfather was a musician who played between appointments. The father, Vincenzo junior, spent time working in Germany before returning to Bovino to continue the family tradition. The tools accumulated: Belgian sharpening stones, bone combs, boar-bristle brushes, Floyd aftershave that has been produced since the 1930s.
The Seventh Generation
Today, the shop is run by Luigi Scapicchio — the seventh generation — together with his brother Sergio, his father Vincenzo, his wife Pina, and his daughter Gaia. Three generations work side by side in the same space, using many of the same tools their ancestors used.
The original Koken chair still occupies its place of honour. A vintage oven still heats the towels. The straight razors — including Japanese kamisori blades — are sharpened on stones and softened on leather strops before each client. The shave itself takes the better part of an hour, and Luigi will tell you that the purpose is not efficiency but presence: the barber as a figure of care, of attention, of human connection in an age that has largely forgotten what those things feel like.
The shop has been featured on Rai Tre’s documentary Barbieri d’Italia and on Striscia la Notizia. Luigi opened a pop-up on Via Montenapoleone in Milan. He launched an academy — the only one in the world dedicated to old-style shaving — that has trained over 900 barbers from across Europe and the United States. Captain Fawcett, the English grooming brand, created a signature shaving soap in collaboration with the family, scented with fig, olive, and bay rum as a tribute to Vincenzo’s transatlantic journey.
But the heart of the operation has never moved from Bovino.
Why Bovino Matters
Bovino is not on most travellers’ itineraries, and that is precisely what makes it worth visiting. Perched at the edge of the Daunia mountains in the province of Foggia, it is one of those small Italian towns that seems to exist in a different relationship with time. The medieval centre is intact. The views stretch across the Tavoliere plain toward the Adriatic. The rhythm of life is governed by seasons, markets, and the slow accumulation of generations.
The Scapicchio barbershop is not a museum or a tourist attraction. It is a working business where local men still come to be shaved, where the conversation is in dialect, and where the tools on the shelf have been in continuous use for longer than most countries have existed. Sitting in the Koken chair, wrapped in a hot towel, listening to the sound of a blade being drawn across a leather strop, you are participating in something that connects you — through an unbroken chain of hands and gestures — to a barbershop in Prohibition-era Chicago, and before that, to a village barber-surgeon in the age of Bourbon kings.
Italy is full of places like this: places where a single family, a single craft, a single address has quietly outlasted empires. You just have to know where to look. If stories like this are what draw you to Italy, Italy Trails is built around exactly this kind of discovery — the Italy that exists between the monuments.
Finding the Scapicchio Barbershop
The shop is at Corso Vittorio Emanuele 28, in the centre of Bovino. It’s about 30 kilometres southwest of Foggia, reachable by car in under half an hour. Appointments are recommended — a proper Scapicchio shave is not something that can be rushed. Luigi and his family can be contacted at barbershop.scapicchio@gmail.com.
Bovino itself is a member of the Borghi più belli d’Italia association and makes a beautiful stop on any road trip through the lesser-known reaches of Puglia and the Daunia mountains. If you’re planning a drive through the region, have a look at the self-guided routes on Italy Trails for ideas on how to weave it into a wider itinerary.
Seven generations. Two centuries. One chair that crossed the Atlantic and came home. Some things in Italy are best understood not by reading about them, but by sitting down, closing your eyes, and letting the ritual begin.
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