Campari , the iconic bright-scarlet, bitter aperitif, is the flagship brand of the Italian drinks conglomerate Gruppo Campari. See aperitif and digestive. Campari has been a fixture in Italian life, both as a drink and, through its ubiquitous advertisements, as a part of the country’s visual environment, since the end of the nineteenth century. It is a key component in the Negroni, Italy’s main contribution to the global cocktail canon.
The Campari company was founded by Gaspare Campari (1828–1882), a farmer’s son from Novara, between Milan and Turin. When he was fourteen, he became the apprentice distiller at the elegant and popular Caffè Liquoreria Bass in Turin; according to some sources, one of his fellow apprentices there was Alessandro Martini (1824–1905), cofounder of the vermouth brand. Returning to Novara in 1856, he established his own business, following the same traditional Italian model as Bass, wherein cafes made their own liquors in all the popular types, plus a few of their own.
In 1862, Campari moved his business to Milan, finally settling in a space in an old arcade on the city’s cramped main square, across from the cathedral. When the arcade was demolished, three years later, he moved the shop to temporary quarters until 1867, when the new and modern Galleria Vittorio Emanuele opened on the site of his former shop. As someone displaced by its construction, Campari had first crack at one of the new commercial spaces in the Galleria. He took a prime space next to the main entrance facing the cathedral. This, along with the new formula he had developed while away from the square, was the foundation of his, and his company’s, fortune.
That formula was for a “Bitter all’Uso d’Olanda” (“Holland-Style Bitter”), as it was initially known, which was rapidly simplified to “Bitter Campari” and then just “Campari.” Normally, such a formula would have used bitter orange peel as its main bittering agent, as in the “Bitter de Hollande” published by Pierre Duplais in his benchmark 1855 Traité des liqueurs. However, Gaspare’s notebooks, which have been preserved in the Campari museum, show a somewhat different initial title: “Stoughton d’Holanda.” Stoughton’s Bitters were not Dutch, but rather English, with a formula dating to the 1690s; by the late 1700s, unauthorized recipes for them had proliferated to the point that they had become a standard apothecary’s and distiller’s formula. See
Campari’s bitter was a great success, and by the time of his death he was not only selling it at the cafe but also wholesaling it in large demijohns to other cafes in the city. His son Davide (1867–1936), who took over the management of the company in 1888 after apprenticing at a distillery in Bordeaux, transformed Campari from a local success into an international one. In part, he did that by emphasizing only two of the company’s many products: the bitter and a new, French-style “Cordial Campari,” flavored with raspberries and saffron (in 1920, all the others were discontinued). He also displayed an early and sophisticated dedication to advertisement.
In 1904, Davide moved the company’s manufacturing out of the cafe basement and another auxiliary site to a large new factory in the Milan suburbs. By then, Bitter Campari was being shipped as far away as San Francisco and Buenos Aires, and the firm’s splashy posters were ubiquitous in Italy and in Paris, where the bitter was aggressively marketed. He sold the Milan cafe in 1919, in order to concentrate on the producing side of the business, and discontinued all products except the bitter and the cordial the next year. In 1923, the company built a satellite factory outside Paris, and in the 1920s and early 1930s Bitter Campari was widely used in Parisian cocktail bars, to the point that the American humorist Nina Putnam Wilcox could write about her visit to France in 1933 that “all Gaul was divided into three parts: one part gin, one part vermouth, and one part Italian bitters.”
Meanwhile, in 1932 the company launched a premixed Campari soda, in an instantly iconic single-serving conical bottle, which brought its fortunes to new heights. World War II, however, almost destroyed them: in 1945, sales were half what they were in the 1920s, the French branch was gone, and exports were at a halt. Yet Campari was one of the success stories of the postwar Italian economic miracle, and with the help of the Negroni cocktail, the quintessential dolce vita drink, the company went on to new heights, becoming an essential bar staple in every part of the world. See Negroni.
In 1976, the company began a process that saw its control passing from the Campari family to the Garavoglia family, with whom it rests today. In 1992 it ceased producing the cordial, which had been languishing for decades, and soon after embarked on an aggressive series of acquisitions, buying brands in Europe and the Americas. As a result, Gruppo Campari, as it is now known, is one of the leading multinational spirits companies, with brands as diverse as Wild Turkey American whiskies, Grand Marnier, Appleton Jamaican rum, Skyy vodka, and Aperol, the Italian low-alcohol aperitif, which it built into an Italian and then international institution through its canny promotion of the Aperol Spritz. See Aperol Spritz and Grand Marnier.
Duplais, Pierre. Traité des liqueurs. Paris: 1855.
Jones, Andrew. Aperitivi: guida agli aperitivi di tutto il mondo. Milan: Idealibri, 1998.
Putnam, Nina Wilcox. “Bouncing Checks.” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, December 17, 1933, 20.
Rennie, James. A New Supplement to the Complete Pharmacopoeias. London: 1829.
Valsecchi, Pietro. Nuovo ed unico manuale completo del distillatore liquorista. Milan: 1857.
Vergani, Guido. Thirty Years and a Century of the Campari Company, 3 vols. Milan: Campari Advertising, 1990.
Wondrich, David. “The History of how the Negroni Conquered America.” Daily Beast, June 10, 2019. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-history-of-how-the-negroni-conquered-america (accessed February 22, 2021).
By: Leo Leuci and David Wondrich
Bottled Americano (Campari and Vermouth) in the Campari Museum, Sesto San Giovanni, Milan, ca. 1910. Source: Wondrich Collection.