Seven Red

I like this, from our friends at Loungerati:

Since reading about the 500 year anniversary of DOM Benedictine contest last year, I have been tinkering with my own recipe that honors the liqueur but also tips the trilby to the iconic Italian macchina, the Fiat Cinquecento (“500″ in Italian). In other words, DOM meets MOD, a drink that you could have in Torino or West London or Brooklyn. May I introduce a delicious new aperitivo!

Head over to Loungerati to get more on this, including the recipe for The Cinquecento. Just as a note, she and I always make fun of the Fiat Cinquecento. We were listening to NPR one day, and it must have been the 50th anniversary  of the iconic car, because they had some guy on with a thick Italian accent who said something like, “You know, many people in Italy were told that they were conceived in a Fiat Cinquecento.” Wink wink. Hahaha, said the otherwise serious NPR journalist lady, the implication being Oh those crazy Italians with the sexy and the passion! Needless to say, she and I cracked up, since this remains the way “Italy” functions in the American imaginary, even on Marketplace. So now, whenever we see a commercial or news report that draws on the same trope (“Italians are soooo passionate”), we immediately break into Italian accents and say “Did you know, non per niente, that I wuza – how you say – conceived with the bang bang in a Fiat Cinquecento, which izza the funny, yes?, because it is such a smallah car!”

Just as a side note, one could easily index the production of the Fiat Cinquecento to the whole of postwar economic development – and corresponding labor struggle – in Italy. It was through the Cinquecento that the Mirafiore Fiat plant expanded into its giant form; it would become one of the primary sites (along with the Pirelli rubber works in Milan) of the labor uprisings of 1968 (at Pirelli, especially), the Hot Autumn of 1969 (with the occupation of Mirafiore), and the culmination of that cycle in 1973-74.  (Production of the Cinquecento shifted away from Mirafiore in the mid-1960′s, in a deal with Pirelli, Fiat, and Bianchi/Autobianchi). We also see in the production of the Cinquecento the problem of the rapid rise in output in the factories (indeed, the 1957, 1960, and 1965 numbers for the Cinquecento show something like an 80 degree curve, upward), which required the mass migration of southern workers to the industrial valleys of the north, produced the mid-level “pink collar” class of technical workers that would become crucial for autonomist arguments against traditional union structures, and pointed up the problems of intensified labor exploitation together with stagnating wages, the very conditions that made the CGIL accomodationism that much more dramatic. Certainly, there were other industries that shifted the composition of the Italian working class during this period (the development of the massive petrochemical plants in Porto Marghera industrial corridor, for instance), but it would be hard not to see the development and popularity of the Fiat Cinquecento (especially during the 1960′s) as contributing directly to the transformation of the Italian labor movement in the 1960′s and 70′s, which of course comes to us today through people like Negri (Potere Operaio’s role in the Mirafiore strikes of 1973 are especially important for understanding this trajectory). I guess it’s more fun to say “My mama said she makuh the bang bang in the Cinquecento!”

So, to the Cinquecento. I’ll ask Loungerati’s cocktail specialist to make me one when we get back east, and I know what I’ll be drinking to.

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