2024-08-07 17:06:48
Drinking in the teenage years usually starts as a rebellion, as a strategy to leave the school grounds or with a friend at home whose parents are more relaxed or not interested in their children’s activities. When I was young, I was everything but a rebel.
Of course I still drink beer, but I can count the real losses on one hand. As a country bumpkin with an early driver’s license and access to grandma’s Toyota, I quickly became a forced taxi driver for my beer-loving friends. My mother has also given me a cautionary tale of her childhood adventures, revealing her alcoholic nemesis: Campari Orange, followed by Blackout.
So for a long time I didn’t particularly like to have criminal bitters anywhere near me. In fact, my first contact with revolution was an accident: hoping for the flavor of a tequila smell, I drank a friend’s beer at night. A bitter mistake – but one that stuck with me.
It should not stop with Campari Orange
In the next few weeks of summer in Trier, it must be 2018, I ordered Campari Orange every now and then while my friends basked in the lightness of their Aperol. And because I’m the only person who approves of the “housewife cocktail,” as one salesperson assured me, it’s become something like my signature drink.
But everyone’s first signature is a brave attempt to participate in the adult world. And so Campari-O with quinine, rhubarb and pomegranate notes is as bitter as the first tax return, but mostly – in retrospect – it is different.
I was alone in a cocktail bar in Munich, the name of which will remain silent here. Munich often boasts, with a half-ironic touch, as “the northernmost city in Italy” – at least when it comes to their gastronomic excellence, the Bavarians are not entirely wrong.
When I asked for a Campari Orange, a bartender looked at me sympathetically and then served me a Garibaldi. The ingredients are the same, but the preparation is different – and that’s why Garibaldi stands next to Campari-O like a Ferrari Testarossa next to a Fiat Cinquecento. Or just like Giuseppe Garibaldi next to Silvio Berlusconi.
Garibaldi’s Taste of Venetian Melancholy
Both are unmistakably Italian, but one is made in Germany, the other is appreciated by connoisseurs. The Garibaldi taste of Milanese hustle and bustle, of Venetian melancholy and of the stunning beauty of the Amalfi coast, unmistakably classic, but boring only to the palate of those who think that the jet-set world has robbed them of any sense of sensuality.
As the freedom fighter of his name, Garibaldi also became radicalized abroad, although not in Argentina, but in New York – without a doubt the most Italian city in the USA. There, in the legendary cocktail bar Dante, which I only know from stories and the Internet, they first came up with the idea of shooting fresh oranges through a high-speed drink and making the resulting foam on top of the red bitters on top. ice. And so a drink has been created that, from two simple ingredients, develops the power that makes you dream of a better, united world in the summer. The possibilities are in the foam.
Back to New York. My path probably won’t get me there any time soon. But to Milan. There, right on the Piazza del Duomo, is the Galeria Vittorio Emmanuele II, named after the first king of a united Italy after the Risorgimento. It is on the ground floor Camparino, the tree where Davide Campari was born and the drink is made. Two different oranges are used here to mix Garibaldi. And there, dear friends, I would like to sit in the warm morning and taste this freedom that has become water. Because freedom tastes bitter – and yet as bright and fresh as youthful rebellion.
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