Florence Cocktail Week – Italian Cuisine – Italian Cuisine


The Florentine mixing shines, the Florence Cocktail Week becomes the reference point for the Italian world of cocktail bars, and beyond

Florence it is one of the Italian cities in which a cultural-literary movement linked to historic cafes appeared in the eighteenth century. In the 1830s, in fact, there was turmoil in the areas of Piazza del Duomo and Piazza della Signoria, in the rooms of the Caffè Michelangiolo, still today in Via Cavour, in the 1850s the Macchiaioli movement came to life with the its cultural avant-garde. It should not be forgotten that in 1865 Florence was the capital of Italy (from February 3 to June 30, 1871) and the number of cafes increased from 19 to 107 in the space of a few decades. Enrico Rivoire's café dating back to 1872 is still in Piazza della Signoria, La Rosina, il Bottegone, Caffè Elvetico, and up to Piazza della Repubblica where some of the most important historical cafes in Florence were founded such as Paszkowski, Le Giubbe Rosse ( temporarily closed) and the Gilli 1733 (remaining example of a Belle-Époque café, the second oldest after the Florian in Venice) where, between drinks and views, you can relive the bygone days of artists and writers.

Florence Cocktail Week

These are just some of the places where literary magazines and artistic movements found fertile ground, where the great Italian poets drew inspiration. Today some of those mythical places have been replaced by the blind capitalist culture and, where there was a cultural manifesto, lingerie or a mug of beer from an Irish pub now appears. In Florence, the Negroni cocktail was also invented by the count of the same name who, in the 1920s, used to add a dose of gin to the Americano, thus giving birth to the iconic red drink: a plaque affixed to the walls of the former Caffè Casoni, in the city center, to preserve its memory.
But it seems not enough, many drinkers, and unfortunately also many Florentines, overlook the fact; the air is changing, however, and if Franco Zeffirelli showed the artistic and architectural beauties of Florence with an elegant and composed direction in the film A tea with Mussolini (1999), Paola Mencarelli today does the same with hers Florence Cocktail Week. Or rather, for five years now.

Florence Cocktail Week

The appointment, which has become annual, is much more than a virtuous meeting between bartenders who work in the city and come from the best counters in the world: "When we started, the city had several valid realities, but not an elite place: after Milan and Rome began to appear timidly. In short, although the birth of the Negroni is attested here, but many still ignore it, the literary cafes were beginning to become bars, the hotel cocktail bars were little frequented – the central role in this start triggered about ten years ago is the ability of the Four Season which represents the Renaissance of mixing in hotels with its Atrium – our event served to give impetus to improve and begin a new path of success and of no small appeal , she says proudly.

This is the case of the Savoy Hotel, which today has begun to concretely consider the world of liquid hospitality and gradually other different realities are following this path. Worthy of note is the experience in the Picteau Cocktail Bar inside the luxurious Hotel Lungarno. There Florence Cocktail Week wanted to work on three categories of bars. The more classic version, where research also appears, stands out among these Il Locale which is not only architecturally appealing, but valid for experimental mixing complete with an underground laboratory, an avant-garde beacon in the city. The "Street Bars", characterized by "high volume", which in Florence until a few years ago no one even knew what they were (Mencarelli's broad views managed to clear this reality too and insert it in the city with a valid example among walls of the Mad – Souls & Spirits. And that of the hotel precisely. "Today there is a climate of great community, the barmen are a lot of group and the movement of the Tuscan-Florentine mix is ​​emerging in an important way." demonstration comes from the historic Cibreo, a strong city entity and living room of Florence that, for the first time and with a spontaneous candidacy, wanted to participate not only by proposing his cocktails combined with the good cuisine of Fabio Picchi, but by welcoming in the Teatro del Sale the adventurous History of the birth of the bar from the pirate galleons of the 1600s to the New Orleans of the late 1800s, staged by the guys from Blue Blazer, Giampiero Francesca, Massimo Macrì and Simone Mina.
The next step will be to work on blending tourism: the Tuscany Cocktail Week and the will is to be able to create a network among the many young people who commit themselves and as many entrepreneurial realities at a family level, bulwarks of a culture of drinking and traditions linked to valid distillations.

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