PROSECCO & APEROL

The Italians are masters at distilling herbal, citrus, and vegetal flavors into intensely colorful bitters and liqueurs (and cleverly bottling them with the best labels in the business!). Balanced with a little sweetness, these odd flavors, typically low in alcohol, are used to make the classic Italian aperitifs (the Negroni and Americano are the best known of the group). Like any good herbal concoction, they aid and stimulate the appetite—just the job of an aperitif. Aperol has a bittersweet orange flavor. We like the way its bitterness balances with the slight sweetness of prosecco.

When we’re getting ready to serve this cocktail, we rinse our fluted glasses and stick them straight into the freezer to get frosty cold. Pour 1½ ounces Aperol into a well-chilled flute and top it off with bone-cold prosecco. Cincin! —makes 1

ITALIAN DARK & STORMY

We have a fondness for making up and using nicknames. They’re mostly endearing (though some can only be repeated in our own company) and they make us smile. This cocktail has one: Marcello Mastroianni. Every time we serve these, we feel like we’re getting our Sophia Loren on and drinking in the good life.

Fill a short, pretty glass with ice cubes. Add 1½ ounces Ramazzotti and top it off with ginger ale. Squeeze in the juice from a fat wedge of lemon and add the lemon wedge. Cento di questi giorni!—makes 1

CYNAR COCKTAIL

From an American’s perspective, Cynar is probably the oddest of all the Italian bitters—it’s artichoke-based.

We drink it to our health like this: Fill a short glass with ice cubes. Rub the rim of the glass with a quartered lime. Pour 2 ounces Cynar into the glass and top it off with tonic water. Add a wide strip of lime zest. Squeeze the juice from the lime into the drink, discarding the wedge. Give the drink a quick stir.—makes 1

The Art of Eating in Italy in the Summertime
BY LORI DE MORI

Until I actually lived there, my imaginings about eating in Italy on a summer’s day went something like this: There would be a long wooden table under an arbor with dappled sunlight filtering through bright green leaves. We would eat great bowls of pasta and pass around platters of sheep’s milk cheese, cured meats, and thickly sliced country bread. We would pour wine into each other’s glasses and olive oil onto tomatoes still warm from the garden, sprinkled with sea salt and basil leaves.

I was mostly right about the food and the conviviality (somehow it’s as easy to cook for ten in Italy as it is to cook for one). But I had the setting all wrong. What I had forgotten to imagine was the heat: the oppressive, sticky reality of the Mediterranean sun at its most harvest-ripeningly, sea-shimmeringly powerful. Italy in August is not entirely unlike Italy in February, both have weather so fierce and at times inhospitable that at least part of the day is better spent safely indoors, withdrawn from the elements.

In the summer, this includes lunchtime unless, I have discovered, you are British. For so sun-deprived are you that you will delight in taking your lunch under a blinding midday sun, preferably without a hint of shade, merrily eating and drinking while your peachy skin tans Englishly, which is to say, to a most alarming shade of red.

Italians tend to find this version of summer lunch unnecessarily arduous. The wine goes straight to one’s head. Colors are all too bright, and subtle flavors are drowned out by the heat. “There are times to work on one’s tan, and lunchtime is not one of them,” an Italian would say.

When I first moved to Italy nearly twenty years ago, I had to reshape my habits and learn to cook and eat in stupefying heat for days on end. It didn’t matter that my then husband was Italian and well versed in summer survival tactics. I was from California, where when the sun would shine too much, we simply turned on the air conditioning. But our old Tuscan farmhouse had no such modern convenience. Nor did it have screens on the windows, through which all manner of living creature came and went with temerity, including fireflies, on one terrifying occasion a pair of bats, but mostly bloodthirsty hordes of mosquitoes. I had never lived so close to the elements.

The house did, however, have working shutters, or le persiane as they are called in Italy. Ours were wooden and painted a dark, ashy green. And they were paragons of functionality: double-jointed contraptions that not only swung open sideways but also outwards like a visor, so we could see out but the sun couldn’t see in.

Le persiane, I eventually learned, were key to summer happiness, along with the billowing mosquito nets we draped over our beds, and a daily regimen of that most wondrous of Mediterranean customs: the siesta. We did all that we could to help the house breathe out hot air and take in long slow inhalations of cool air throughout the night. The opening and closing of windows and shutters punctuated our days like church bells: opened at sunset when the day’s relentless heat began to lift (though not right at dusk, which was mosquito witching hour); and closed in the earliest hours of the morning, windows first, shutters just before the sun hit them.

In summer, eating had its own rhythm too, like le persiane. Breakfast, never a grand affair, is even less so—coffee, toast, yogurt, and fruit at most—but delightful to eat outdoors under a fresh morning sky. By lunchtime the shuttered house becomes a refuge—a haven of cool, dim rooms where you walk barefoot over smooth terra cotta floors and make simple, delicious meals of things that don’t need to be cooked: Mozzarella, tomato, and basil; prosciutto and melon; salads made from day-old bread torn into pieces with olive oil, red onion, cucumber, and, yes, more tomatoes and basil.

Postlunch, in a perfect world, you give over to the languidness of summer, go to your room, peel off your clothes, and stretch out on cool cotton sheets under the whir of a fan to read a few lines of a book before drifting off. And then, it is back out into the day. The countryside has the baked wheaty scent of cinnamon and hay, and the worst of the heat is over. You go out for an ice cream or a Campari and soda and perhaps do a bit of shopping for the next meal.

Evening is a relief, celebratory even, and summer nights are a swirl of lively meals under an inky black sky, of food cooked over wood fires, of candlelight, cicadas, and ripe peaches sliced into chilled white wine. And all the while, the windows of the house are thrown open to the night.

Lori De Mori is an American writer who specializes in the food and culture of Italy. She created the charming Towpath Cafe in London, where she lives with her English husband, photographer Jason Lowe. Whenever she can, she returns to her restored 200-year-old farmhouse in the Tuscan hills.