Photo by Alex Krook
In the spring of 1913, D. H. Lawrence sat at a café table in the Cathedral Square in Milan and drank a Campari soda. He and his wife, Frieda, had spent the past year or so in Italy, walking and writing. As well as finishing a draft of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence had written essays reflecting on the trip, which in 1916 were gathered in Travels in Italy. In the final of those essays, as the pair were leaving the continent – the silent lemon groves of Como, the high fields of the Tyrol – Lawrence paused over his drink. ‘I saw that here the life was still vivid… But there was the same purpose stinking in it all, the mechanising, the perfect mechanising of human life.’
It feels right to me that Lawrence drank Campari as he reflected on the modern world, on Europe at the brink of war, on his return to England and the themes of his later work. Campari is bitter, but it’s also kind of gaudy. It’s the red of smudged lipstick and London buses, with a back of the tongue throb that’s barely pleasant. It’s a fucking great drink for a mope.
I’ve been thinking about Campari for about two years now, on and off. In summer 2018, I drank a lot of it. London was having a heatwave that knocked everyone on their backs. All over the city, people sweated on crowded tubes until deodorant powdered in their bare pits. They crowded into beer gardens and ate hot chips with salt, their legs under the table streaked with algae from swimming outdoors. I spent the summer in my mum’s garden. I’d moved home in response to a long depression – not my childhood home, but her new flat, bought after my parents split. She was making it on her own, rebuilding her life and her garden. I was drinking and moping, or as I might have put it then, thinking.
Beyond the garden, with the heat heavy over the city, Brexit was going to happen, or it wasn’t. We were headed for a recession, for empty houses and foodbank queues, or we weren’t. I kept miniature bottles of prosecco in my underwear drawer, because the smaller the bottle the less you appear to drink. A few times a day I poured one into a balloon with ice and red liqueur.
Campari’s history lives up to the drink. It’s got everything you need to spin a mythology: a man with a dream, a wayward son, an opera singer, and a massive advertising budget.
It was the idea of Gaspare Campari, whose name rhymes if your Italian pronunciation is bad. He lived in Novara, just outside of Milan – a jack of all trades in cafés and restaurants, with an interest in liqueurs and a habit of tinkering. He’d been playing with grain alcohol, herbs, spices, and botanicals, when he hit some luck around 1867. He added cochineal – red food colouring made from beetles – to one of his drinks, and his wife died. When he remarried, his new wife lived in Milan, the big city. He bought a café and got to work selling Campari.
The next bit is a jumble, according to who you ask, so I’ll trace it in the way most convenient for my purposes. Campari had more luck: the café was on the proposed site of a grand new piazza. When the authorities tried to uproot him, he negotiated for it to be rebuilt in pride of place, in the new Galleria Victorio Emmanuel II. He brought in his sons to help with the business, and they proved to have a knack for it, guiding him to greater focus on his new moneymaker. They installed an innovative new pump system, syphoning cold water up from the cellar to mix with the drink. When Mr Campari died in the later 1800s, Davide took over. He carried Campari into the 20th century with all the spirit of the belle époque: he fell in love with an opera singer, and used her touring as an excuse to market the drink around the world.
The rest is a story of branding. A 2018 exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Italian modern art claimed that Campari advertising has been ‘responsible for some of the most distinctive and innovative imagery created in Italy’. You might know the posters: the art nouveau bottles angular on black backgrounds; the puppet Pierrots of the futurist Fortunato Depero. Despite the importance of futurism in Campari’s branding, some exhibitions and writing on the subject omit the details of its history, particularly its strong ties to fascism. Marinetti’s 1909 futurist manifesto proclaims, for instance: ‘We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.’
When D.H. Lawrence sat in Gaspare Campari’s bar in Milan in 1913, he was ruminating over something like a signature drink of mechanisation and modernity. And while today, Campari might seem to speak more of liberal European continentalism than fascism – more of Nigella Lawson and Stanley Tucci than futurism – the bar is still there. You can go and sit nearabouts where Lawrence sat, and drink the bitter, smack in the throat hooch.
In the years since Depero’s Pierrots, Campari ads have been graced by stars: Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz, Uma Therman, Jessica Alba. The brand has put out some insane ads in Europe, featuring suggestions of vampirism, as well as some intensely techno German slots. In the 1980s, Federico Fellini directed a Campari ad.
Here’s the scene. There’s repetitive, tinkling music. A plush train carriage, in which a young woman is fidgeting, bored. A man sits opposite her. He’s dapper, moustachioed, and leering and grinning like a creep. She looks away from him, seizing a remote, and begins to tap to change the landscape outside the train’s moving window. They pass the pyramids of Giza. Zap. They’re passing French churches, Greek ruins, the surface of the moon. Frustrated, she chucks the control at the man. He gestures – ‘hang on’ – and taps to bring up the leaning tower and baptistery of Pisa. She sits up, suddenly interested. A shadow in front of the baptistery draws away, revealing a huge, building-high bottle of Campari. She’s delighted! The leering man leers cheerfully, and we cut to reveal a stewardess coming into the carriage bearing a tray of Campari. Close up on her face. She winks.
There’s almost no one involved in Fellini’s Campari ad that isn’t mocked. The young girl, standing in for an Americanised generation, obsessed with ads and tv. The older man, stuffy and unsettling, supplanting Italian heritage with product placement. The viewer, brought in on the jokes with the wink, and the acquiescence that getting the joke entails. And Fellini, the great director making ads, the fact of which he can’t help but ridicule. It’s a bittersweet minute.
The heatwave of summer 2018 eventually broke. I moved out of my mum’s flat into a house with lots of people, and I met someone. Brexit ticked on. Labour lost an election. We got hit with a pandemic and an incompetent, racist prime minister, and the country locked down too late. Thousands have died. At the same time, the streets filled with people demanding their rights. We protested police brutality and systemic racism. We spoke widely about a different kind of world; about the abolition of police, abolition of prisons.
I moved into a basement flat with my new partner. It has a concrete yard where we now grow tomatoes and tend a tiny lemon tree. We drink stubby beers from Lidl, and cook endlessly, and slowly, slowly, I’ve stopped drinking as though it were possible to think while drunk.
In her book, Aperitif, Kate Hawkings explains why drinks like Campari are served before dinner. They’re traditionally bitter, which stimulates all kinds of things in the body. Bitterness induces a fear of poison: our heart rate rises, we salivate, our digestive system hypes up, we produce adrenaline. We get heady, almost high. ‘We like bitterness in drinks,’ she writes, ‘because it smacks of menace’.
It felt right to drink Campari, flat on my back in my mum’s garden, wondering whether I was mentally unstable, or selfish, or bored. Right, too, I would have thought, to drink Campari locked down and anxious scrolling, staring into the menace. But somehow, I almost never drink it anymore. My partner doesn’t like Campari. It’s too bitter.