“The bitters are excellent for your liver, the gin is bad for you. They balance each other.”

Orson Welles

No one really knows where this fabulous elixir originated, the most popularly accepted account is that it was invented in  Florence, Italy in 1919, at Caffè Casoni, now called Caffè Cavalli. Count Camillo Negroni invented it by asking the bartender, 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.  One of the earliest reports of the drink came from Orson Welles while working in Rome on Cagliostro, 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.”

However, Noel Negroni, a member of the prestigious Negroni family recently researched the family archive and discovered there never was a Count Camille Negroni. According to Noel it turns out that the true inventor of the Negroni is Pascal Olivier de Negroni de Cardi , Comte de Negroni, Noel’s fourth cousin.  According to Noel Negroni, since Corsica is much closer to Italy than France it’s not a huge leap to presume that Comte Pascal would have been very familiar with Italian gastronomy.