Pasticceria Marchesi’s signature cocktail
PHOTOGRAPHS KEVIN FAINGNAERT @kevinfaingnaert
MY KNOWLEDGE OF ITALIAN cocktail culture begins and ends with the Aperol spritz. Like many, I took up drinking these in the mid-tens, powerless to resist a marketing campaign that made the alcoholic equivalent of Tango the post-work beverage of choice. But Italy’s most famous aperitivo export belies a subtler drinks culture - and there’s nowhere better to sample it than Milan. When the clock strikes 6pm, the city collectively downs tools, its wide streets suddenly peppered with people holding drinks in traffic-light colours. By 7pm, it seems as though every Milanese citizen has a cocktail in one hand and a breadstick in the other.
Aperitivo snacks at MAG Café
glasses ready for service at Marchesi
getting into the spirit at Rita’s Tiki Bar
a waiter at Bar Basso.
The ritual of aperitivo - a pre-dinner drink served with snacks - took off here in the 1920s. The concept rose to prominence alongside Aperol’s bitterer and redder cousin, Campari, produced in the suburb of Sesto San Giovanni and a key ingredient in several classic aperitivo cocktails, including the negroni. Milan took several decades to diversify its drinks list, and the first to ring the changes was Bar Basso. It has not lost its touch: arriving one sunny evening, I have to wade through customers long before I can get to the bar. Standing outside are off-duty models in normcore trainers; men wearing nautical stripes, inked arms and seafaring beards; and women in boxy Chanel jackets clutching either a small dog or a large bag.
At the counter, surrounded by black-tied bartenders dishing out cocktails and small bowls of olives like they’re dealing cards, I find Basso’s owner, Maurizio Stochetto, drinking a Perseghetto. Made with dry vermouth, vodka, sparkling wine and peach juice, the one he hands me is light and inconspicuously boozy. Maurizio prefers it to Basso’s signature cocktail, the Negroni Sbagliato, coined by his father. Using prosecco instead of gin, it is served in a huge goblet known as the Colossus. ‘This is the first place where you could get a cocktail on a street corner,’ says Maurizio, whose family have managed the bar since 1967. ‘Originally, because drinking was not respectable, cocktail bars were small, dark booths.’ His hands spread wide to indicate Basso’s interior, its gilded mirrors and sparkling chandeliers, faux-marble floors and cabinets brimming with bottles. ‘This was something different. It took the experience made fashionable by the American jetset, drinking in the lounges of the big hotels, and brought it to a neighbourhood bar.’
Drinkers at Bar Basso spill onto the streets.
Bar Basso’s Maurizio Stochetto favours a Perseghetto.