The word aperitivo derives from the Latin aperire, to open — the idea being that a small, slightly bitter drink before dinner opens the appetite and prepares the digestive system for the meal to come. Whether this is genuinely physiological or simply a pleasant fiction that Italian culture has maintained for centuries is debatable. What is not debatable is that the aperitivo hour — that loosely defined window between six and eight in the evening when Italians gather in bars and on piazzas with their Campari sodas and Aperol Spritzes and Negronis — is one of the great institutions of the Italian day.
The Aperitivo by Region
The aperitivo ritual varies significantly by city. Milan’s version is the most elaborate: the aperitivo hour here has evolved into a semi-institutionalised practice in which bars in the Navigli district, Brera, and the Porta Romana area lay out lavish buffets of small dishes — bruschette, mini focacce, arancini, cured meats, cheeses, pasta salads — that are included in the price of a drink. The Milanese aperitivo is, in effect, an early dinner consumed standing up, an efficient solution to the problem of an Italian dinner hour that rarely begins before nine in the evening.
Turin, which invented the aperitivo in a formal sense — the Martini & Rossi and Carpano companies, which produced the first commercial vermouth in the late eighteenth century, are both Torinese — maintains a more traditional version. The bars around Piazza Castello and along Via Po serve their drinks with small accompaniments: chips, olives, a few cubes of cheese. The emphasis is on the drink itself, on conversation, on the social function of gathering rather than on the food.
In Venice, the aperitivo takes the form of the cicchetti hour — small bites of crostini with tuna, salt cod, artichokes, or speck, eaten standing at the bar in the bacari of the Rialto market area or Cannaregio, washed down with small glasses of local white wine called ombra. The tradition here is centuries old and stubbornly resistant to the tourist culture that has transformed most of Venice’s food scene. The best bacari are known only to locals and to the small number of visitors who ask where the Venetians actually drink rather than where the guidebooks direct them.
The Essential Aperitivo Drinks
The drinks themselves form a canon of Italian culture as significant as any regional cuisine. Campari, invented in Milan in 1860 by Gaspare Campari and still made to the original recipe, is the founding spirit of the Italian aperitivo — bitter, complex, red as a sunset, and endlessly versatile. Aperol, sweeter and less alcoholic, has become the base of the spritz, Italy’s current dominant aperitivo drink and one of the fastest-growing cocktails in the world. Negroni — equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth, stirred over ice and served with an orange peel — is the sophisticate’s choice, invented in Florence in 1919 by a count who asked his bartender to strengthen his Americano.
Why the Aperitivo Hour Matters
Whatever you drink, wherever you drink it, the aperitivo hour is above all a social practice — a daily ceremony of connection, conversation, and collective decompression that Italy performs with a grace and a naturalness that the rest of the world, in its various attempts to import the tradition, has never quite managed to replicate. To experience it genuinely is to understand something essential about why Italy, despite all its difficulties and contradictions, remains a country that the world looks towards when it imagines the good life.
