Cocktail History
The History of the Negroni
A Florentine count, an Americano, and a splash of gin: how the Negroni became the cocktail intelligentsia's favorite and spawned a global family of equal-parts drinks.
The story of the Negroni begins with an act of aristocratic impatience. Count Camillo Negroni, so the story goes, walked into the Caffè Casoni in Florence in 1919 and asked his bartender, Fosco Scarselli, to strengthen his usual Americano by replacing the soda water with gin. The result — Campari, sweet vermouth, gin, equal parts — was the Negroni. Whether this story is literally true is somewhat beside the point: it has the shape of truth, and the drink it describes is genuinely extraordinary.
Count Negroni's Legend
The Americano's Older Brother
To understand the Negroni, you first need to understand the Americano: Campari, sweet vermouth, soda water. This Italian café drink had been served since the 1860s, when Gaspare Campari developed his bitter liqueur in Milan. It was a genteel, low-alcohol aperitivo, consumed before dinner to stimulate appetite. Adding gin in place of soda water transformed a mild aperitivo into a spirit-forward cocktail of considerable complexity and — this is the crucial innovation — equal parts.
The equal-parts template is the Negroni's structural gift to cocktail culture. One part gin, one part sweet vermouth, one part Campari — a formula so simple it can be memorized in seconds, yet producing a drink of genuine complexity. The Bitterness of the Campari, the botanicals of the gin, the sweetness and spice of the vermouth: each ingredient earns its equal share.
Verifying the Legend
Italian cocktail historians have attempted to verify the Count Negroni story through historical records. Luca Picchi, bar manager at Caffè Giacosa (the successor to Caffè Casoni), published research in 2002 suggesting that Camillo Negroni was a real historical figure — a Florentine aristocrat who spent time in the American West and returned to Florence with a taste for stronger drinks. The 1919 date aligns with historical records of Negroni's residence in Florence.
The story is not proven beyond doubt, but it is better documented than most cocktail origin myths. It is certainly true that the Negroni appeared in Italian bar culture in the early 1920s, spread to the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel in London, and was included in bar books of the period.
The Sbagliato
A Happy Accident
The Negroni family gained a major new member in 1972, when a bartender at Bar Basso in Milan — accidentally, according to the story — reached for a bottle of Prosecco instead of gin. The result was the Negroni Sbagliato ("mistaken Negroni"): Campari, sweet vermouth, Prosecco. Lower in alcohol, more effervescent, delicate rather than bracing, the Sbagliato became a staple of Italian aperitivo culture and an international hit after a 2022 viral moment involving actress Olivia Wilde and Campari's marketing apparatus.
The Sbagliato illustrates something important about the Negroni family: the equal-parts template is extraordinarily forgiving of variation. Change any single ingredient — gin to bourbon, Campari to Aperol, sweet vermouth to dry — and you have a different but related drink. The Negroni family is perhaps the most generative template in contemporary cocktail culture.
The Boulevardier
Bourbon Negroni
The Negroni template crossed the Atlantic with American expatriates in Paris. Erskine Gwynne, publisher of the literary magazine Boulevardier (a connection that suggests the name), was associated with a drink that replaced gin with bourbon: bourbon, Campari, sweet vermouth, equal parts or approximately so. The Boulevardier appeared in print in Harry McElhone's 1927 Barflies and Cocktails.
The Boulevardier is the Negroni for people who find gin's botanicals too assertive. Bourbon's sweetness and vanilla notes change the drink's character entirely — warmer, richer, less piney and herbal. The Balance is different: Campari's bitterness now plays against bourbon's sweetness rather than gin's dryness. Both are excellent. They are not the same drink.
This substitution logic — what happens when you change the base spirit of an equal-parts drink — became central to craft cocktail menu development in the 2000s and 2010s. Death and Co's menu famously offered multiple "riff" variations on Negroni-family drinks using different base spirits, different amari, and different vermouths.
Negroni Week
Philanthropy and Campari
Negroni Week is an annual event organized by Imbibe Magazine and Campari, during which participating bars donate proceeds from Negroni sales to charitable causes. It began in 2013 and has grown to include tens of thousands of bars worldwide, raising millions of dollars for organizations ranging from food banks to international aid organizations.
Negroni Week is remarkable as a corporate sponsorship event that genuinely amplified something culturally real. The Negroni was already experiencing a revival driven by craft cocktail culture when Negroni Week launched; the event accelerated and institutionalized that revival. It also demonstrated that a single drink could become a vehicle for community identity — a way that bartenders and their customers could express shared values through a shared ritual.
The Negroni's current status in cocktail culture is difficult to overstate. It is the drink that most reliably signals sophistication without pretension: bitter enough to separate it from sweet cocktails, simple enough to be ordered without a glossary, quality-dependent enough that a good Negroni reveals something about the bar making it. Stirring a Negroni properly — thirty-five rotations over large ice, strained into a rocks glass over a single large cube, garnished with an expressed orange peel — is a fundamental test of craft bartender competence. The Count, whether or not he existed in quite the way the story says, chose well.