Aperitivo, Back Inside

On a low table the first drinks have been poured. Beside them a basket of grissini and puccia, a board with cheese and salame, a knife left out so that everyone can cut what they want. Nothing has been portioned in advance and nobody is being served. Someone breaks bread, someone passes the cheese, and the conversation picks up where it stopped on the mountain.

Aperitivo, Not Après-Ski

The two occupy the same hour and mean opposite things.

Après-ski faces backwards, toward the slope. The ski clothes stay on, the music gets louder, and the energy of the day is asked to keep going a little longer. It happens in public, usually within sight of the lifts.

Aperitivo faces the other way. It starts once everyone is home and changed, and it opens the evening rather than closing the day. The mountain is still in the room, in the view, in the cold held a while longer by a jacket near the door, in the story being told about the last run. It no longer has to be the subject.

The food is not a meal and is not trying to become one. Bread, grissini, cheese, salame, a bowl of olives. Enough to slow everyone down and give them a reason to stay in the room before the evening takes a shape.

Three Drinks, Two Hundred Years

The spritz is said to have been invented by Austrians who found Italian wine too strong. After 1815 the Habsburg garrisons settled across the Veneto, and the soldiers took to asking innkeepers for a splash of water in the glass. The German for to splash is spritzen, and the name of the drink is the order those men repeated all day long. The bitter came much later: Aperol was presented at the Padua fair in 1919, one year after Cortina stopped being Austrian.

In between, Cortina made one of its own. In 1948, at the bar of the Hotel Posta, a barman named Renato Hausmann squeezed fresh mandarins into champagne and called it a Puccini, a winter answer to Venice's Bellini. It was a drink for the grand-hotel season and for the people who came for it. The valley itself was drinking ponce, Skiwasser and grappa made with herbs.

Then, two centuries after the soldiers, the mountains did it again. In June 2005, in a bar in Naturno, in South Tyrol, a bartender named Roland Gruber went looking for something lighter than the Venetian spritz he was selling by the hectolitre, and mixed prosecco with soda, mint and a syrup made by a local farmer. He had meant to call it Otto. The name Hugo came out of a conversation with his customers.

Naturno is nowhere near the Dolomites. The Hugo climbed anyway, and in Cortina it now arrives beside the spritz as often as not.

Prepared, Not Arranged

Aperitivo at home needs no menu. The basket holds the grissini and the puccia, the valley's rye bread, which comes out of the oven low and flat, as if the rising had failed. The name says as much: in the local dialect a puccia is something badly made. The board takes the cheese and the salame, and in Ampezzo both came out of the same habit of wasting nothing. The fresh cheese was zigar, made from what was left behind once the butter had been churned. The meat was preserved in còncia, the local cure of salt worked together with pepper, garlic, juniper berries and herbs.

None of it began as a delicacy.

The board gets pushed toward whoever is sitting furthest away. The knife travels from hand to hand. Someone takes only bread. Someone else cuts salame while finishing a sentence.

Our pieces are made for that part of the evening: the basket passed, the napkin unfolded, the objects no longer where somebody put them. A table completed before the guests arrive and photographed before anyone touches it was never the point.

The setting should survive being used, and it should look better afterwards.

The Host Who Stays in the Room

There is a way of entertaining in which the host is everywhere except with the guests: measuring drinks, hunting for another bowl, apologising for not sitting down.

The glasses can be out already. The bottle can be cold, the ice ready, the orange cut. Bread and grissini go in the basket, cheese and salame on the board, cocktail napkins beside the glasses. After that there is almost nothing left to do, and the person who did it can pour a drink and sit down.

The room feels easy because somebody thought about it earlier, and the thinking does not show.

Small Enough to Be Found Later

A cocktail napkin is the smallest piece of linen in the room and often the first one touched. A glass goes down, a hand moves the napkin closer, and only then does the embroidery come into focus: the skier, or the narrow single chair carrying one figure through the air.

Those two motifs belong to this hour more than to any other. The chairlift turns up indoors, beside the first glass. The skier is noticed once the skis have already been put away.

Neither has any work to do in building a mountain atmosphere. The boots by the door did that. The scale is deliberate: larger, and the linen becomes a statement; small, and it waits to be found by the person holding it.

The Window Turns

Late in the afternoon the glass changes.

For a while it still holds the mountains, the last light on the pale rock while the valley underneath has already gone dark. Then it begins giving back the room instead: lamps, firelight, people moving, the colour of a drink, somebody leaning in to cut more cheese.

For a few minutes the mountain and the room share the same surface. Then the reflection wins.

The day outside has not gone anywhere. It has stopped asking for everyone's attention.