Bar Zucca, now Camparino

all things must pass

There is a legendary bar, always crowded but always somehow pleasant to be in, at the Duomo end of the beautiful Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan. It used to be called the Bar Zucca after a company that made a herbal vermouth called Rabarbaro Zucca. Rabarbaro is Italian for rhubarb, and refers here to the root rather than the stems. In practice, Zucca’s rabarbaro was a vermouth with a more intense, medicinal taste. The bar Zucca used to offer a unique cocktail called Lavorato Secco that was, to lovers of Negronis like myself, the ultimate in its genre, and which to me felt like the soul of Italy in potable form, a local version of the alchemical aurum potabile.

It was made from Campari, Rabarbaro Zucca and Cent’erbe (one hundred herbs) liqueur, a thing made by Zucca especially for that bar and nowhere else, but which faithful customers could apparently buy on request. Campari, a different company from Zucca, took over the bar recently and banned Zucca products from being shown. Result: the mixture between Campari and Rabarbaro is now mixed in the engine room and brought up in an unmarked bottle; more seriously, Zucca no longer supplies the Cent’erbe. The lavorato secco is still served, but it no longer tastes as it should. When I went there two weeks ago, the barman was miserably unhappy about this state of affairs.

The place is so small that the probability that you are standing on the exact same spot Puccini once stood on, on the way to the Scala at the other end of the Galleria, approaches 1: a certainty. The dimwit within Campari management who erased all memories of Zucca will fry in Dante’s 9th circle of hell, reserved for traitors.