Bars and restaurants around the world need to think about the way they deal with customers during the pandemic. In the Italian city of Florence, some look to the past: with centuries-old wine windows with the food and drink of dol.
Above just above ground level, blink and you may miss these small openings, “buchette del vino” (literally “small wine holes”) in Italian. The small windows were used to sell wine during the Renaissance period, and were intended to be cheaper, direct-to-consumer alternatives to taverns and other liquor stores – not to mention a discreet way for buyers to pay taxes on the alcoholic life they paddle.
Those merchants were the elites of Florence, many of whom had built the foot-long windows in street-facing walls of their palatial dwellings, mostly next to the main entrance. In the 1500s, a number of aristocrats of the city were also important wine producers in the surrounding countryside. The “buchette” allowed them to trade their spirits (or rather, servants do it for them) directly from their own cellars to basically anyone, with a reduced need for physical contact.
In May, when Italy demanded its two-month-long lockdown, several F & B companies in Florence, which happened to be based in buildings with existing bouquets, decided to renovate them, using the minimal contact aspect of the design. Wine, Aperol sprays, ice cream and sandwiches have long been served through the holes, at a safe distance.
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