Walk through the cobbled streets of Florence, and you’d be hard pressed to find an aperitivo table missing a certain ruby red-hued drink: the Negroni. It is the cocktail’s birth city, after all. The punchier, sultrier cousin of the Campari Spritz, the Negroni was born right here, on the luxe shopping street Via dè Tornabuoni, in 1919, when horse-drawn carriages still roamed the streets–as did one Count Camillo Negroni.

The count had lived in both London and New York and came back to his hometown of Florence with a newfound cosmopolitan mindset; in New York, he’d frequented the trendy drinking clubs, where mixology was taking hold–unknown in Italy at the time. Wine was almost exclusively the drink of choice for Italians, though the well-heeled would begin to “drink American” with combinations of spirits and vermouth. (It wouldn’t be until post-WWII that cocktails and the character of the barman would start to take hold here.)