Americano Cocktail

Before there was a Negroni, there was an Americano, and before that there was the Milano-Torino. The original name was a geography lesson: Campari from Milan, sweet vermouth from Turin, poured in equal measure. It is one of the oldest surviving Italian aperitivo mixtures, dating to the later nineteenth century and closely associated with the Campari family's own bar in Milan.

How the Milano-Torino became the Americano is less certain. The most repeated explanation is that American visitors took to it in such numbers that the name followed, with Prohibition-era travellers often cited as the ones who cemented it. That account is plausible and widely printed, but the documentary trail is thin, and a rival explanation notes that americano in Italian can carry a sense of something modified or adapted. Either way, the drink was firmly known by its current name well before the middle of the twentieth century.

Its fame outside Italy owes something to fiction. In Casino Royale, the first drink James Bond orders in the first Bond novel is an Americano, a detail often forgotten by people who remember only the Vesper. Fleming's Bond considered it the sensible thing to drink in an unfamiliar bar, which is sound advice.

The Americano is also the direct parent of the Negroni: replace the soda water with gin and you have made the more famous drink. Understanding that relationship is the fastest way to understand both. The Americano is the long, refreshing, low-strength version made for drinking before dinner in warm weather; the Negroni is its concentrated, spirituous descendant.

At roughly the strength of a glass of wine, the Americano suits the moment better than almost any classic. As bars have moved toward lower-alcohol drinking, it has been rediscovered by a generation that arrived at it from the Negroni rather than the other way round.