Cardinale – IBA

The Cardinale is a variation on the Negroni, the Italian aperitivo most commonly traced to 1919 Florence, at Caffè Casoni (now Caffè Giacosa), where bartender Fosco Scarselli is said to have strengthened Count Camillo Negroni's usual Americano by replacing the soda water with gin, adding an orange garnish to distinguish it from the citrus-and-soda original. This account is widely repeated but not settled: rival claimants include a French Count Pascal Olivier de Negroni, said by his descendants to have created a vermouth-based drink decades earlier in Senegal, a claim complicated by the fact that Campari was not yet in production at the time given for it, and a competing theory that the cocktail instead developed in early-1920s San Francisco as a gin-based variant on the Martini. The Cardinale itself is generally credited to bartender Giovanni Raimondo at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome around 1950, reportedly mixed for a visiting cardinal during Pope Pius XII's Holy Year Jubilee, with the drink's reddish hue and name tied to the churchman's robes; some accounts instead place the story in 1926 or 1947, and Harry's Bar in Venice has occasionally been floated as an alternate birthplace, though the Excelsior version is the one most consistently documented. Its defining departure from the Negroni is the substitution of dry vermouth for sweet, giving a drier, less fruity profile.