How the Negroni Was Born in Florence

Sometimes stories blur into myth and legend until they harden into belief, or tradition. Florence knows this better than most, and carries in its luggage countless conflicting claims about the birth or the invention of this thing or that one, perhaps part of the inheritance of a people famously, and fondly, painted as skeptical and hard to convince.

One of those claims has passed from mouth to mouth for a very long time, right up to today, and it concerns the birth of a cocktail loved the world over: the Negroni. We have all heard that it was born here, and that a nobleman who lent it his name invented it. Yet nobody ever bothered to prove it for certain.

Nobody, that is, except “the Count,” Luca Picchi: a pillar of Florentine bartending, forty years behind a bar, seventeen of them behind the counter that has looked out over the city’s most important square since 1872 — Caffè Rivoire in Piazza della Signoria.

Luca set off “on the trail of the Count” in the late 1990s, driven by the urge to put an end to the many tall tales he had swallowed over the years. His research eventually led him to the Negroni family itself, who reached out and handed over precious family photographs. He has published four books in all, the latest of which, Cocktail Negroni: una leggenda italiana (published by Giunti), sits on bookshelves as far away as the United States.

The story of Cammillo (yes, with two “m”s) Negroni is a captivating one: a man of noble Italian-English stock who, in the early years of the last century, moved by an adventurer’s spirit and a certain friction with the society of his day, sailed to the United States in search of fresh opportunity. He soon ended up herding cattle across the great American plains — in a word, a cowboy.

The Count came home shortly before the First World War, but was among the lucky few never called up to fight. The same could not be said for young Fosco Scarselli, who in 1918, barely twenty, walked home from a prison camp and found work as a counterman (not a “barman” — there were few of those back then, and they worked almost exclusively in the grand hotels) at the Drogheria-Profumeria Casoni, a kind of gourmet grocer and bottega of delights that from 1933 would take the name Caffè Giacosa.

Aperitivo at Casoni was a ritual for the gentlemen of the day, and it was here that the two protagonists of our story met.

One fine day between 1918 and 1920, the Count asked his trusted bartender to add a measure of gin to his usual aperitivo: the Americano (red vermouth, Campari bitter, and soda water). The mix was delightful, and it quickly became Cammillo‘s favorite drink. He tended to order it under his breath, so as not to be overheard, guarding a kind of jealousy over his creation. But in Florence, as we know, secrets have short legs — and the Negroni was soon in vogue among the well-to-do, and within a few years known and loved around the world as the drink that embodies the bittersweet dolceamaro character of the Italian aperitivo.

Thank you, Count! •

Words by Julian Biondi
Photos by Luca Picchi and the Negroni-Bentivoglio family