It is a little known secret about me (err... until now that is) that I am particularly fond of a Campari and Soda on a hot summers evening. Just the thought of the drink brings back evocative memories of all sorts of squares and pavement cafes strewn across Europe with my money left in exchange for the slightly fizzy, brilliantly red and very bitter drink. Served long and with a straw of course.
My other passion - good industrial design and elegant items that hold everyday objects (what? you didn't know about that either? shame on you!) - is cross-fusef with my love for Campari in a strange way too.
Campari bottles that are on the shelves of supermarkets worldwide do not tell the true story of the drink. The smaller 10cl bottles that you can find in Italian cafe bars and good cocktail bars across Europe are at the root of a design excellence hat stretches far back, into the 1920's in fact. These bottles (see picture below) were designed in 1932 and are still unchanged to this day.
Product CampariSoda 10cl bottle, 10% abv
Designer Fortunato Depero
Year 1932
Company Gruppo Campari, Novi Ligure, Italy
Since it is interesting (to me!) here's a little more about the company and product.
Gaspare Campari was born in Castelnuovo, Italy in 1828 and by the time he was just 14 was working as “apprentice maitre licoriste”, a type of highly skilled and knowledgeable barman, in Turin. In 1860 he founded Gruppo Campari in Milan. Campari's business model was almost Coca Cola-ish in its aggresiveness - he would only sell his product to outlets displaying “Campari Bitters” posters, which themselves became design icons when Davide, Gaspare's son took over the business during the 1920's. This brand focus - notably decades, indeed almost a century, before the concept became embedded in advertising culture sometime around the late 1970s - meant Campari quickly became established as a strong brand across Italy and set the stage for what is today a global brand selling over 30 million bottles per year to make the company the 6th largest operator in the global beverages marketplace. For all the stats click here.
Secrecy surrounds the drink. Even today only one person knows the entire formula of ingredients, Luca Garavoglia the Group's managing director. One of the main known ingredients is bark from Cascarilla trees that grow in the Bahamas.
The CampariSoda bottle in the picture was designed by Fortunato Depero, an Italian futurist artist in 1932 and a now infamous poster featuring a dancing clown inside a peeled orange was designed by Leonetto Cappiello in 1921.
In the middle of the 80's I used to buy the Sunday Times religously. This might not be strange in itself given it was a Sunday when I did it. Nothing special there you might think? Only, I was 16 or 17 years old and I guess it's not the usual thing you'd expect someone of that age to settle down to read. Especially given that I wasn't a nerdy 6th former type at the time (not me - not then, not now, not ever!). On the Saturday night you'd usually have found me dancing around to the latest synth-pop electronic music at my local nightclub, driving around the town with my mates eyeing up women or, a year or so later, taking my girlfriend out.
So, what was I doing with the Times on my knee each Sunday afternoon. Tucked up happily in a suburban house somewhere, essentially nowhere (but that's open to debate) in the east of the country?
In fact, after a quick read through a news section or two (back then the Sunday Times was even bigger and heavier than it is now.. or maybe my hands are bigger?), I used to spend most of my time browsing the Jobs pages, focused mainly on City of London type jobs, and the Cars and Houses pages stuffed full of ads for Bentley's, exotic Italian sports cars and Thames-side apartments that were going for £100,000... imagine that £100,000! (I'll have 3 of those these days). I used to amaze myself at what some people were selling - not becuase of the fact that it was a real life Lamborghini like I'd grown up with on my bedroom wall, but more because I realised that some people were on the other side of the transaction and had the sort of money that most people could never ever dream of having (back then credit wasn't thrown at you like in recent times and if you drove a nice car you were not leasing it). I even set myself a target of being a millionaire by the time I was 30 and driving a Porsche 928S. Don't ask me where that particular dream went, but come and go it certainly did despite a move to London and a really well paid job for a while - I think I know what happened along the way but that's for another blog post..
Hmmm... What brought this retro-rant on you might ask? Last week I was completing some work for a client listening to The Pet Shop Boys 'Please' and the various 12 inches associated with it in the background. Listening to Opportunities or Love Comes Quickly brought back a feint whiff of my mindset and aspirations at the time. Like a lot of kids in the 80s I did have the Lamborghini Countach poster on the wall alongside Debbie Harry wrapped provocatively in a plastic sheet (focus, Polko, focus!). So, mine was a typical UK upbringing of glorification of material items and money-making and Thatcher was in power and people were indeed making lot's of money.. some people anyway, and my world was touching on that little group through girlfriends and family businesses so what did I know of others in Merseyside or elsewhere that were actually not making anything at all.? That was to be changed a few years later in the episode where Polko ventures west from his home town.
Nothing wrong with a bit of dreaming though if you ask me. People were still social, people still talked to each other. These days almost everyone is unable to talk sensibly to you as they are tapping away at the text keys of the latest mobile gizmo - a disease that started sometime in the 90s and has subsequently come into its horrible own in the first ten years of the 21st century. Even if they did start a conversation today it would probably be about some minor celebrity on tv last night, their latest BMW 3-series lease car, football or some other drivel wholly unrelated to how they were really feeling or thinking. Almost certainly not the state of the Middle East or about something with a little more meaning than kicking around a piece of leather that is meant to symbolise a pigs stomach for some unknown reason.
Give me the 80s any day - to (mis-)quote Depeche Mode, back then People Were People...
...oh, and the winning Euromillions Lottery numbers this week would come in handy to buy some of those things I used to look at too. I'd still drive that white Lamborghini Countach (if only to disgust my current girlfriend!) but might pass on the London flat for something a little more rural, and a little more French.. with horses darling!
Dream on.
