Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Italy may not have mastered the art of forming a queue or sticking to train schedules, but some rituals are adhered to strictly. For example: a meal is not complete until its various courses and their corresponding drinks have been served in the correct order. The digestivo signals the end. At restaurants, the waiter leaves a bottle of limoncello, grappa or sweet wine on your table along with an unspoken invitation: drink as much as you like and when you’re ready, I’ll bring the bill.
For the past year, though, the limoncello increasingly sits untouched, if presented at all. In late 2024, Italy introduced significantly stricter enforcement of its blood alcohol limit for driving (at 0.5g/L it is lower than in England, where it is 0.8g/L). In my city, Trieste, roadside alcohol checks, once sporadic outside holidays, now happen on ordinary weeknights — part of a crackdown that includes fines of up to €6,000, jail time and long licence suspensions. “In the beginning, everyone panicked,” says a chef who runs a Michelin-starred restaurant on Lake Garda. “Especially those with more to lose: lawyers, doctors, executives. They think their name will end up in the paper.” His restaurant has seen a steady decline in dessert wine and digestivi sales for years, but the crackdown has accelerated it. Now guests often skip the nightcap, opting instead for wines by the glass earlier in the meal.
I often use the Fuoricasello guide when travelling for work — a directory of traditional, family-owned osterie within 10 minutes of motorway exits. A 1950s trattoria near Bologna, a personal favourite, used to go through four bottles of digestivi per week. Now they barely finish one. “At a table of four, three drink and one suffers,” the waiter says, describing what he calls “very obvious designated drivers”. Coffee has taken the place of amaro.
Halfway between Trieste and Gorizia, an osteria sommelier tells me that the question of who gets to drink the digestivo has become an act of love. “Couples each used to have two. Now you’ll see one person drinking a grappa, the other watching, ready to drive home.” The restaurant has scrapped its digestivo and sweet wine pairings from the tasting menu and replaced them with aperitivo and sparkling options before dinner. The body metabolises roughly one unit per hour, so swapping a 40 per cent grappa at the end of the meal for a 12 per cent sparkling at the start makes a rough sort of sense.
Some restaurants are leaning into this early-drinking shift. A fine-dining restaurant close to the Slovenian border has revived a tradition: pairing the starter with Ramandolo, a local sweet wine. “A hundred years ago, starting a meal with sweet wine was customary,” the sommelier explains. “It’s our responsibility to find new spaces for these products.”
Even in Italy, traditions can be reinvented according to the times. As to whether drivers might one day come to accept that the safest amount to drink is nothing? Piano piano, as they say.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram