AuthorThe Cocktails Must FlowCategoryCampari, London Dry Gin, Orange Wheel, Sweet VermouthDifficultyBeginner

The drink's origins are not known with certainty. The most widely reported account is that it was first mixed in Florence, Italy, in 1919, at Caffè Casoni (then called Caffè Giacosa), on Via de' Tornabuoni. (The Caffè no longer exists; the site is now occupied by a Giorgio Armani boutique.) Pascal Olivier Count de Negroni concocted it by asking the bartender, Fosco Scarselli, to strengthen his favorite cocktail, the Americano, by adding gin rather than the normal soda water. The bartender also added an orange garnish rather than the typical lemon garnish of the Americano to signify that it was a different drink.

After the success of the cocktail, the Negroni family founded Negroni Distillerie in Treviso, Italy, and produced a ready-made version of the drink, sold as Antico Negroni 1919. One of the earliest reports of the drink came from Orson Welles in correspondence with the Coshocton Tribune while working in Rome on Cagliostro in 1947, where he described a new drink called the Negroni, "The bitters are excellent for your liver, the gin is bad for you. They balance each other."

Cocktail historian David Wondrich researched Camillo Negroni, whose status as a count is questionable, but whose grandfather, Luigi Negroni, was indeed a count.

Descendants of General Pascal Olivier de Negroni, Count de Negroni, say he was the Count Negroni who invented the drink in 1857 in Senegal. A Corse-Matin Sunday Edition article from 1980 says he invented the drink around 1914. An article in the New Hampshire Union Leader reported on the controversy.

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