IN PIÚ D'ORA.
Seven Drinks from the End of the Night.

This book was born on the margins of a series of stormy nights—not necessarily in a meteorological sense—between the winter of 2018 and the spring of 2019. During one of these evenings, the memory of an old friend and teacher resurfaced. Before leaving, he had organized a party and offered me a taste of rhubarb shakerato, an old Milanese aperitif that is now almost extinct.
From this memory came the desire to revive and share that gesture, blending it with the memory of other liqueurs accompanied by old songs. This led to the decision to name the collection In più d’ora (more than now), Seven Drinks from the End of the Night.

In più d’ora is an expression used by Elio Vittorini in Le città del mondo to describe an ancient gesture that exists simultaneously in the present and in time. Vittorini uses the term to depict his mother, now elderly, performing a traditional action such as drying codfish. While observing her, he sees her both as she is now and as she was when he was a child—existing in a double reality that is present and, at the same time, outside of linear time.

The seven drinks trace a journey through memory “to the end of the night,” borrowing a paraphrase from the title poem of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel. They describe a passage through a difficult period, unfolding at the edge of the city where my studio is located and where these seven vertigoes were composed and allowed to mature between 2019 and 2023.

Each drink is named after a song, inspired by the taste and the situation that each potion aims to capture. The recipes are composed of simple steps and lend themselves to interpretative variations, including professional ones. At the same time, they are imagined to be prepared at home, in the countryside, in a meadow, or by the sea.

Finally, the pages of this book faithfully reproduce the pages of my notebooks where the recipes were conceived and where I prefer them to remain, as places in which they continue to be told.

Mediate - In più d’ora mediates memory through ritual and instruction. Personal recollections, gestures, and affects are translated into recipes that can be reenacted, interpreted, and transmitted by others.

Displace - The project displaces the act of mixing drinks from professional or nightlife contexts into domestic, peripheral, and informal environments. It shifts the cocktail from performance to recollection, from consumption to narration.