Living la dolce vita

Aperitivo is an artform in Italy, but could the UK ever pull-off an equivalent? According to Katie Mather we’re already halfway there.

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Katie Mather
Illustration: Heidi Berton

Wednesday 21 May 2025

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This article is from

The Italian South

issue 49

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It’s summer 2017—every drink is rosé or lager. The parasols in the beer garden are Peroni branded, the weather is a balmy 16 degrees celsius. You close your eyes, and when you open them it is 2018. Everything is orange. There are spritzes in oversized wine glasses filled to the brim with ice everywhere you look. The Aperol takeover of the UK afternoon beverage market began in 2016, but by 2020, it had become everyone’s favourite sunshine drink—your mum swapped her rhubarb gin for it, your friends brought a bottle to your barbecue. You’d never drank anything like it before, but somehow that luminous orange colour and the mingling of bitter, fruity flavours with sickly sweet Prosecco was easy to knock back. There was something nostalgic about it, it felt familiar…

In Italy, aperitivo is a lifestyle, and not in the aspirational way that word is used—it’s just an everyday part of life, and one which centres around, but is not limited to your pre-dinner drink of choice. Most often, when we talk about aperitifs, we’re talking about ‘amaro’—a word which means ‘bitter’ in Italian, and is commonly used to refer to a range of bitter liqueurs which, depending on how and when they’re consumed, can be an aperitif, or a digestif.

Blessed with herbs, spices and other apothecary-gathered barks and berries, amari constitute a diverse and nuanced category of drink. Some are sweet, depending heavily on orange peel and cassia. Some are puckeringly bitter, and some are spiced and medicinal, even minty, reminiscent of liqueurs from Alpine regions and the Black Forest. Their recipes come from monasteries and old pharmacological tinctures, and their aim is to tickle your tastebuds and ignite the flames of appetite within you.

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to the aperitif. If an amaro is drunk neat, perhaps with an ice cube, it’s widely regarded as an after-dinner drink, or digestif. Add a splash of prosecco and it becomes an aperitivo, that is, a before-dinner drink. However, an aperitivo isn’t always an amaro. It can be a Prosecco, if you’re dining by the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua, or a Negroni in Rome.

Whatever you drink, there’s got to be something to nibble on to coax your hunger—perhaps some little picos de pan and a plate of cherry tomatoes, a focaccia to tear into, or something as simple and beautiful as a dish of orange slices. The idea isn’t to fill up, but to draw a line under your day, to transfer from working you to relaxing you, to leave your worries for the next day and start on the more important matter of living la dolce vita.

The UK has taken to the flavours of the traditional Italian aperitivo pretty well, if not the practice. Imagine an Italian’s horror at spying a glass bottle of premixed Aperol Spritz on an early morning flight to the Canaries. The shock of a can of M&S Campari soda being opened on a train to Liverpool. Delicious? Oh my, yes. Part of the grand tradition of aperitivo? Not wholly. It’s not something we do here in the UK—years of diet fads have led half of us to abandon snacking altogether, and the other half remember being told off for raiding the fridge before teatime for “spoiling our appetite”. Eating anything prior to our evening meal seems unusual bordering on illegal. But drinking a little boozy treat? That we could probably get on board with.

The most popular brands of aperitivo-adjacent liqueurs in the UK are Aperol and Campari, both known for their bright colours and bitter flavours. You should know, however, that neither Aperol or Campari are known as amari in Italy—but in America they are happily each described as such. Just to confuse you. The most well-known types of amaro, actual amaro, in the UK are drinks like menthol-medicinal and beloved by bartenders Fernet-Branca, bittersweet artichoke-flavoured Cynar, and Amaro Montenegro, an amaro made with 40 botanicals including vanilla and sweet orange. These complex, highly aromatic liqueurs were made for sipping, ideally in the company of some good friends, while a bowl of olives and a nice big packet of crisps have just been opened. Look at that. You’ve achieved aperitivo, just like that.

Take another sip of Amaro Montenegro and let the unexpected wash of sweetness warm your palate. What can you taste? Citrus peels, vanilla, nutmeg… is that oregano? Saffron, elderflower, the spice and tingle of ginger… hang on a moment. It’s Irn Bru. It tastes like Irn Bru. Are you getting that?

Perhaps we’re not as far from an aperitivo revolution as it seems. We already have a wealth of drinks that play with the flavours of bittersweet botanicals, right here in our corner shops. Vimto, Irn Bru, Tizer, Lucozade were all invented as alcohol-free alternatives to the demon drink in the late 19th century, or as pharmaceutical pick-me-ups made by pharmacists. Irn Bru is the best one; a drink devised to improve stamina, fitness and vitality, it tastes almost identical to sweeter-flavoured amari.

Vimto was invented in 1908 in Manchester as a herbal tonic called Vimtonic, advertised to give the drinker “vim and vigour”. Tizer was invented a couple of decades before that in Bury by the Pickup brothers, who also worked with a certain Mr. Fentiman, as an appetiser—that’s where its name comes from. You see, Tizer has always been an aperitivo. That’s why it all felt so familiar. The teetotal tonic-makers of the north, who were part of a much wider teetotal movement in and around the mill towns and cities of Lancashire and Yorkshire, were looking to the flavours and aromas of alcoholic drinks to produce booze-free ways for their fellow man to wet his whistle.

Because of these fruity cordials and tonics, and their later integration into our everyday lives as sugary pop, we’ve become more accustomed to sweeter flavours than true Italian amaro or bitters. A drink made with menthol, eucalyptus, cloves and thyme is probably a lot to ask of British drinkers. But perhaps that doesn’t matter. What do we get for being authentic? Perhaps we should focus on the act of the aperitivo rather than the traditional drinks that go with it, and give our dedication and energy to the part of the ritual that truly makes sense to us—the snacking.

Aperitivo is a moment of enjoyment taken to set yourself in the right frame of mind for our main evening meal

First, it has to be around 5.30pm, but it can be any day of the week. Aperitivo is not about that Friday feeling, it is not an expression of release or relief. It is a moment of enjoyment taken to set yourself in the right frame of mind for our main evening meal—the highlight of any rational person’s day. Aperitivo can be taken at home, or in a bar on the way home from work, ideally outside, but obviously weather and climate applies—use your best judgement. Add some hygge to the situation if needs must, put the wood burner on, grab a blanket, we are in the UK, not Salerno. The idea is to stimulate your tastebuds and awaken your palate with whatever you choose to drink, and this is why bitterness is the accepted norm.

Sip and enjoy, whether you’re a Cynar fan or a Malort heathen. Make yourself a negroni, or plonk a couple of ice cubes into a highball, and add Campari and soda water. Sit and chat, smell the food cooking, and think about what you’re about to eat. Discuss your day. Listen to your friends’ gossip. Pop an olive into your mouth, and enjoy the savoury saltiness mingling with the sugar-syrup-citrus of your drink. Put another one in your drink so you can fish it out later, soaked in alcohol. Tip the glass back for the last melted ice cube dregs. Open a bottle of sparkling water, and welcome the dishes to the table, hot with delicious food and made with love. Perhaps we should focus on the act of the aperitivo rather than the traditional drinks that go with it.

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