Negroni is Italy’s most prominent contribution to the cocktail pantheon, a harmonious but far from bland mix of gin, red vermouth, and Campari, usually served on ice and—in Italy, anyway—with a splash of soda water.
The history of the Negroni is clear in its general outline, although there is a rather inconvenient gap in its timeline. It is clear that, sometime between the end of the First World War and October 1920, when the drink is named in a surviving letter, Count Camillo Negroni (1868–1933), a Florentine aristocrat who had spent time in America as a cowboy, a gambler, and a fencing instructor, took to having Fosco Scarselli (1898–1963), the bartender at the Café Casoni, where he regularly drank, stiffen up his Americanos with a splash of gin. See
In Paris, however, the combination of gin, Italian vermouth, and Campari enjoyed such a vogue in the 1920s and early 1930s that the American humorist Nina Wilcox Putnam could joke in 1933 that “all Gaul was divided into three parts: one part gin, one part vermouth, and one part Italian bitters.” See Campari. The combination (usually served straight up and without the soda) traveled under several names, most prominently the “Camparinete,” and turned up in New York as well. It is possible that Negroni’s creation was the inspiration for these drinks, but it is equally possible that they were thought up independently, the combination being an obvious one. In any case, rising tensions between France and Italy and then war meant that the Parisian taste for Campari did not survive the 1930s.
Meanwhile, the rise of fascism in Italy with its antipathy to all things foreign and un-martial saw to it that Italian cocktail culture kept a low profile and that the Negroni’s circulation was limited to a small circle of Florentine bon vivants. In 1947, however, as Italy took its first steps in shaking off the devastation caused by the Second World War, the Negroni was adopted as a sort of signature drink of the new, dopoguerra (“postwar”) Italy, and in particular of the cafés on the Via Veneto in Rome where the devotees of la dolce vita (“the sweet life”) gathered. It was probably introduced there at Café Doney, a branch of the Florence institution of the same name that opened in 1946: the company that owned Doney had taken over Café Casoni in 1932 and would have known the drink well.
Whether in Italy, where its relative strength marked it as daringly American, or in the United States or Britain, where it was the drink’s bitterness and gaudy red color that pushed boundaries, over the next few years the Negroni became something of a signifier of cosmopolitan taste. As Campari’s American importer put it in a 1956 advertisement, it was the “world connoisseur’s cocktail.” Its jet-set connections helped the drink weather the disco years, which saw so many other classic cocktails fall by the wayside, and then, as the twentieth century rolled into the twenty-first, the Negroni truly came into its own. Bitter enough to be just a little bit challenging but still easy to drink and—just as importantly—easy to make, it became something of an initiation drink for new converts to the craft cocktail movement. In the process, it spawned too many variations to count: White Negronis, with things like blanc vermouth and (uncolored) French gentian bitters, Mezcal Negronis, barrel-aged Negronis, so on and so forth. Nonetheless, the count’s original formula has survived with remarkably little alteration, a testament to its fundamental soundness.
Recipe: Combine in an ice-filled Old-Fashioned glass 30 ml gin, 30 ml red vermouth, and 30 ml Campari. Top with a splash of sparkling water, stir, and garnish with half an orange wheel.
Gandiglio, Amedeo, and Ettore Sottass Jr. Cocktails Portfolio. Turin: Orma, 1947.
Visentini, Gino. “Addio ‘tintarella.’” Corriere della sera, July 8–9, 1948, 2.
Wondrich, David. “How the Negroni Conquered America.” Daily Beast, June 10, 2019. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-history-of-how-the-negroni-conquered-america (accessed March 26, 2021).
By: David Wondrich
Count Negroni, ca. 1920. Source: Courtesy of Luca Picchi.