Raise a negroni

It’s Negroni Week, and while experiments are welcome, let’s not make the Italian cocktail unrecognisable

In 2014, about a year before the negroni was to become such a cult in the US bar and craft cocktails circuit, I found myself alone in Florence, a city I had never visited till then. It was an impulsive trip, as I caught a train from Turin to this miniature Tuscan gem. A friend of a Florentine friend, an Italian policeman, took it upon himself to show me around. And the best way to see Florence, indeed the only way, is to just wander. So it was that we crossed the Arno, to the less touristy, less expensive quarters, into the neighbourhood of the Basilica di Santo Spirito, an ancient church associated with humanism. The enclave around it was once populated by prominent Florentine families such as Frescobaldi, but also poor artisans and tradesmen. Centuries later, Santo Spirito still retains its arty character. In the square, stands a bar whose name I have never noted in all the time that I have visited Santo Spirito since (annually and sometimes twice a year from 2014 to 2019) to repeat a ritual picked up on that first visit: buy a negroni, sit on the church steps, listen to live music some amateur musician inevitably plays in the evenings. And watch the world go by. The negroni, a Florentine creation supposedly, has always been a symbol of la dolce vita, the sweet Italian life, that is also bitter-sweet and certainly lived intensely.