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

This book was born in the margins of some stormy nights - not necessarily meant in a meteorological sense - between the winter of 2018 and the spring of 2019. And it was on one of these evenings that I was visited by the memory of an old friend and teacher who, before leaving, organised a party and gave me a taste of rhubarb shakerato, an old Milanese aperitif, now practically extinct. Hence, the desire to revive and share the memory of him and water it down with the memory of other liqueurs lulled by old songs. And so I decided to call this collection 'in più d'ora' (more than now in Italian) seven drinks from the night's end.

The 'in più d'ora' is an expression used by Vittorini in 'Le Città del Mondo' to express an ancient gesture that appears in being today and at the same time in being in time. Vittorini uses this expression to describe his mother, now elderly, performing an ancient gesture like the tanning of the codfish, and as he observes her, he sees her at the same time young with the eyes of when he was a child in a double reality that is now, and in a more than now because it is also in perpetual time, outside of time.

The seven drinks then describe a trip down memory lane "to the end of the night" to steal a bit of paraphrase from the title poem of Céline's novel, to describe the passing through a difficult period, accompanied to the edge of the city where my studio is located and where these seven vertigoes were composed and then matured between 2019 and 2023, taking this form. Each of them has been given the name of a song, inspired by the taste and situation that each of my potions should capture.
The recipes have simple steps and lend themselves to the interpretative variations, even professional ones, of those who decide to perform them. Still, in their nature, they have been imagined to be composed at home, in the countryside, in a meadow, at the seaside.

Finally, the pages of this book faithfully reproduce the pages of my notebooks where the recipes were conceived and where I like them to remain to be told.