Rome’s Cocktail Culture
When I first arrived in Rome more than two decades ago, craft cocktail culture was barely a blip on the city’s drinking radar. If you wanted a proper mixed drink, your best bet was one of the grand hotel bars—places like the Hassler, the St. Regis, or Hotel de Russie. These old-school watering holes came with gilded mirrors, velvet armchairs, bartenders in pressed jackets, and prices that were way out of reach for my budget.
Fortunately, the early aughts also offered extremely cheap cocktails in student districts like San Lorenzo and Piazza Bologna. Pigneto, believe it or not, wasn’t yet a thing. Neither were spritzes, which didn’t reach critical mass in Rome until around 2009.
At those student bars, seven euros could get you an aggressively sweet mojito, a caipirinha, or a tequila sunrise—and access to a carb-heavy buffet you could pile onto a plate. The drinks weren’t balanced, but they signaled a shift: Young Romans were ready for something other than industrial lagers and house wine. Piazza Trilussa and Campo de’ Fiori turned into open-air clubs, packed with students and tourists waving plastic cups of syrupy cocktails. It wasn’t refined, but it was cheap. And that counted for something.
Toward the end of that decade, the Aperol spritz arrived. After Campari acquired Aperol, it launched a national marketing campaign, transforming a low-ABV aperitivo once limited to the Veneto—especially Padova—into a drink beloved across Italy and eventually around the world.
Around the same time, a few Romans began taking cocktails seriously. In 2010, the Jerry Thomas Project (now called Jerry Thomas Speakeasy) changed everything. Tucked behind an unmarked door near Campo de’ Fiori, it was the city’s first proper cocktail bar in the international sense. Founders Leonardo Leuci, Roberto Artusio, Antonio Parlapiano, and Alessandro Procoli were reviving forgotten recipes and importing the philosophy of American craft mixology. (Jerry Thomas, after all, was the US’s first celebrity bartender.) Rome, a city rooted in wine and spritz culture, suddenly had a speakeasy. And not just any speakeasy, but one that became a pilgrimage site for mixologists from around the world.
Its influence was immediate. Craft cocktail bars began popping up around the city: Banana Republic in Prati, Co.So. in Pigneto (back when that neighborhood was still a frontier), and Barnum Café, which has since transitioned to specialty coffee. The Jerry Thomas team expanded their reach with a spirits brand, educational initiatives, and a growing list of ventures. Roberto Artusio opened La Punta in Trastevere, home to one of Europe’s largest collections of agave-based spirits. His partner in the project, Cristian Bugiada, runs Freni e Frizioni—once a chaotic spritz spot, now one of the city’s most fun bars for creative cocktails. Alessandro Procoli, meanwhile, leads Latta near Ponte di Ferro, a hybrid space for drinking, dining, and fermentation projects, including the brand’s line of canned cocktails.
Patrick Pistolesi picked up that thread and ran with it. After getting his start at Barnum, he opened Drink Kong, a sleek, neon-lit temple to cocktail futurism near Piazza Vittorio, in 2018. With its Japanese-inspired minimalism, cinematic vibe, and perfectly calibrated drinks, Drink Kong feels more Tokyo than Trastevere. And that’s the point. Within a year, it landed on the World’s 50 Best Bars list, cementing Rome’s place on the global cocktail map.
Today, the scene is expansive and eclectic. The classic hotel bars are still delivering old-school glamour, but now some, like the Bulgari and The Rome EDITION’s cocktail bars, are embracing innovation and stepping outside the Negroni-and-martini comfort zone. Across the city, a new generation of bartenders is blending Roman irreverence with global technique. The best bars feel confident, curious, and rooted in place, even as they pull inspiration from abroad.
Rome may have been late to the cocktail party, but it’s more than caught up. The scene now spans the elegant and the experimental, the historic and the futuristic. It’s a city that’s finally found its rhythm—shaken and stirred.