The golden hour: Italian aperitivo comes to Cartagena with La Domenica

There's a moment late in the afternoon when Cartagena's light turns the colour of honey and the façades seem lit from within. The heat lets go, conversations stretch out and nobody is hungry for dinner yet. In Italy that moment has a name. Aperitivo is a ritual: before dinner, a light and usually bitter drink with something to nibble. It's not a meal and not a party. It's a pause to wake the appetite and stretch the afternoon with friends.

From Turin to the Caribbean

The ritual has a history. Vermouth became a commercial product in eighteenth-century Turin, and tradition credits Antonio Benedetto Carpano, in 1786, with the recipe that made it fashionable. A century later, the writer Edmondo De Amicis was already describing Turin's "vermouth hour". The spritz, as the story goes, comes from the Austrian soldiers who occupied the Veneto in the nineteenth century and softened the local wines with water; Aperol, which gave it its orange glow, was born in Padua in 1919.

I · The ritual

What makes a good aperitivo

• The drink: bitter and refreshing; the spritz is the best known.
• To nibble: olives, something fried, something salty. Not much, but good.
• The hour: as the afternoon fades. In Cartagena, when the heat finally eases.

Here that hour has an ally. From December to April, the dry season, the northeasterly trade winds blow and afternoons cool down with a breeze that slips through the balconies and stirs the bougainvillea. An ice-cold spritz at that hour is almost a courtesy to the weather.

An ice-cold spritz at that hour is almost a courtesy to the weather.

II · Italy in Cartagena

Engineers, immigrants and walls

Italy is no stranger to Cartagena. After Drake's raid, Italian engineers of the Antonelli family, working for the Spanish Crown, drew the first plans for the city walls; Bautista Antonelli's 1595 plan is close to their birth certificate. And in the late nineteenth century, immigrants from Calabria, Basilicata and Campania reached the Caribbean coast, above all Barranquilla, bringing their trades, their businesses and their way of sitting down to a table.

III · La Domenica

Endless Sunday

La Domenica will be Casa Salvaje's daytime world: coffee when you wake, pizza for a very long lunch and aperitivo as the afternoon fades. A terracotta room, baskets on the wall, brass tables and no plans at all. Meet La Domenica.

Best for the hour when the afternoon hasn't yet decided to become night.

Epilogue

Before you head home

Cartagena's late-afternoon light found its painter. Alejandro Obregón, one of the most important Colombian painters of the twentieth century, was born in Barcelona, grew up in Barranquilla and spent the last two decades of his life in Cartagena, until his death in 1992. His Caribbean is all fierce colour: condors, barracudas, bulls, mangroves and sea. Look at it with an aperitivo in hand and you'll see that beauty here is never quiet.