On your journeys across Italian restaurants, you may encounter ‘digestivo’, or digestifs. What are they? When are they served? We’ll go over that today.
As you may already intuit from the name, digestivo is something we consume to stimulate digestion. You may also have heard of the custom in Italy to consume an alcoholic beverage along with their meals to accomplish that. That’s exactly what digestivo is – an alcoholic beverage Italians consume after a meal in the belief that this will help them get through that meal quicker. As far as science goes, there’s currently no good evidence to support this claim, but this has hardly ever stopped anyone before.
Digestifs are served in restaurants after dinner – if you’re in a particularly good establishment, they may likely have their own digestivo. They are commonly bitter herbal distillates in the ‘amari’ group of beverages. For their production in Italy, plants and products such as bergamot, quinine, wormwood, aniseed, liquorice or ginger are commonly used. Sugar syrup is added and then everything waits in barrels after filtration.
Of course, there are also regional variations: in Lecco, you may get pure Grappa; in Sicily, we got Limoncello. Same with Campania, even though it’s a region famous for its bergamot-flavoured digestivo. The concept of digestivo has expanded over the last few years – it doesn’t always have to be alcohol either, as a strong coffee or chamomile tea can work too.
What fills us with sadness is that digestivos aren’t all that common in restaurants. Each region has its own famous herbal digestivo: Bologna has Montenegro, Benevento has Strega, Sicily has Averna, Milan has Fernet-Branca. The last of these was actually advertised as ‘antipyretic, anti-worm, refreshing, warming and anticholinergic, as well as a remedy for menstrual cramps’ in a newspaper from 1865.
The history of digestivo dates back merely a few centuries when the bitter taste was associated with medicinal properties. As such, people assumed it could also help with digestion and here we are.
How to drink digestivo?
- Have a meal with friends
- Take out any suitable digestivo (like Fernet-Branca, Strega or Sambuca Molinari), chilled or not
- Fill your glasses to about 50ml
- Drink
- Repeat until you’re the healthiest person on the planet
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