Rome With a View

Garibaldi

The Garibaldi is Campari and orange juice, which for most of the twentieth century meant a perfectly blameless and slightly boring highball. Then Naren Young rebuilt it at Dante in New York around a single word, and the word is fluffy. Fresh orange juice aerated to a foam behaves like a different ingredient. It reads creamier and sweeter against Campari's bitterness, and instead of a bitter layer sitting under a sweet one, the two unify. Same shopping list, entirely different drink, which makes it the clearest lesson available in technique as an ingredient. The name is geography. Giuseppe Garibaldi unified Italy, and the drink unifies Milan's bitter with the south's oranges, which is either a lovely piece of symbolism or a very old bar joke. Either way the juice has to be squeezed at the glass: the aeration collapses within minutes, and the whole drink is built to race it.

Americano

The Americano was born at Gaspare Campari's bar in Milan in the 1860s, served then as the Milano-Torino after its two principal ingredients: Campari from Milan and sweet vermouth from Turin. The name Americano came later, attributed to the American tourists and expatriates who ordered it in such volume that the drink became associated with them. It is the direct ancestor of the Negroni, predating it by roughly half a century. It is one of the simplest drinks in the canon and one of the most instructive. Three ingredients built directly in the glass, no shaking, no stirring beyond a single gentle turn to integrate the soda. The restraint is the point: this is a drink designed for length and sessionability, and for the specific pleasure of something bitter, sweet and effervescent taken slowly in warm weather before a meal. The sweet vermouth is the variable that decides the whole thing. At equal volume to the Campari it has nowhere at all to hide.

Milano-Torino

The Milano-Torino is the aperitivo’s book of genesis: Campari of Milan and sweet vermouth of Turin, equal parts over ice, poured at Campari’s own Caffè Camparino from the 1860s and named for the two cities standing in the glass. The lineage reads like scripture. Add soda and the Mi-To becomes an Americano; swap the soda for gin and the Negroni arrives; mistake the gin for prosecco and the Sbagliato is born. The ancestor outlived all of them unchanged: two bottles, one orange slice, and nothing anybody has managed to improve. It drinks as the family’s softest bitter statement, with the vermouth’s plush meeting Campari head-on and no lengthener refereeing between them, and it remains the correct first glass for anyone setting out to map the red dynasty from its root rather than picking it up somewhere in the middle. Two ingredients and no lengthener leaves both fully exposed, so the vermouth has to be as good as the Campari is consistent.