Drinking in the teenage years usually begins as rebellion, as a conspiratorial ritual away from school grounds or with that one friend at home whose parents are a little more relaxed or are not interested in their offspring’s activities. In my youth I was everything but not a rebel. Of course I also drank alcohol, but I can count the real downfalls on one hand. As a country bumpkin with an early driver’s license and access to grandmother’s Toyota, I quickly became the forced sober taxi driver for my beer-loving friends. My mother had also warned me about her youthful escapades, revealing her alcoholic nemesis: Campari Orange, followed by Blackout. So for a long time I wasn’t particularly keen on letting the crimson bitters anywhere near me. In fact, my first contact with the revolution was an accident: expecting the sweetness of a tequila sunrise, I sipped a friend’s drink late at night. A bitter mistake – but one that stuck with me. It wasn’t supposed to stay with Campari Orange. Over the next few weeks of the summer in Trier, it must have been 2018, I ordered the Campari Orange every now and then, while my friends were in the bright light of their Aperol sunbathed. And because I was the only one who approved of the “housewife’s cocktail,” as a bartender rubbed it in my face, it became something of a signature drink. But everyone’s first signature is a scrappy attempt to participate in the adult world. And so the Campari-O with quinine, rhubarb and pomegranate notes tastes as bitter as the first tax return, but overwhelmingly – in retrospect – it’s different. I only really got carried away in a cocktail bar in Munich, whose name is kept silent here should. Munich often boasts, with a touch of half-silent self-irony, as the “most northern city in Italy” – at least when it comes to their gastronomic quality, the Bavarians are not completely wrong. When I asked for a Campari Orange, the bartender still just looked at me with pity and then served me a Garibaldi. The ingredients are the same, but the preparation is different – and that’s why the Garibaldi stands next to the Campari-O like a Ferrari Testarossa next to a Fiat Cinquecento. Or just like Giuseppe Garibaldi next to Silvio Berlusconi. The Garibaldi tastes of Venetian melancholy. Both are unmistakably Italian, but one is made fun of in Germany, the other is appreciated among connoisseurs. The Garibaldi tastes of Milanese busyness, of Venetian melancholy and of the astonishing beauty of the Amalfi coast, unmistakably classic, but boring only to the palate of those whose supposed jet-set life has robbed them of any sense of sensuality. Like its namesake freedom fighter, the Garibaldi has itself also radicalized overseas, although not in Argentina, but in New York – without a doubt the most Italian city in the USA. There, in the legendary cocktail bar Dante, which I only know from stories and the Internet, they first came up with the idea of shooting fresh oranges through a high-speed juicer and serving the resulting foam on top of the red bitters over ice. And so a drink is created that uses two simple ingredients to develop a power that really makes you dream of a better, a united world in the summer. Opportunities lie in the foam.More on the topicBack to New York. My path probably won’t take me there any time soon. But to Milan. There, right on the Piazza del Duomo, is the Galeria Vittorio Emmanuele II, named after the first king of a united Italy after the Risorgimento. On the ground floor it houses the Camparino, the bar where Davide Campari was born and the drink was invented. Two different types of orange are used here to mix the Garibaldi. And there, dear readers, I would like to sit on a warm morning and taste this freedom that has become liquid. Because freedom tastes bitter – and yet as light and fresh as youthful rebellion.
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