History

Gaspare Campari invented his bittersweet red aperitivo — the exact recipe remains a trade secret, containing between 20 and 60 ingredients including the bark of different trees, plants, herbs, and aromatic roots — around 1860 in Novara, where he worked as a distiller. He moved to Milan in 1862, opening the Bar Campari in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the glass-vaulted arcade just completed in the city's centre. The bar became a fixture of Milanese intellectual life: the poet and playwright Carlo Porta frequented it, and the Campari Soda (Campari pre-mixed with soda, served in the distinctive cone-shaped single-serve bottle) was invented for the bar's aperitivo hour. Campari reached beyond national borders in the 1890s and became one of the first Italian food and drink brands to have a global distribution in the early twentieth century.

The company commissioned advertising from some of the most inventive Italian graphic artists of the period. Fortunato Depero, the Futurist artist who later designed the famous “Campari Soda” conical bottle in 1932 (one of the first examples of a branded vessel designed as a work of art), created a series of posters and advertisements for Campari in the late 1920s. Leonetto Cappiello's 1921 poster — a clown astride a galloping horse, red overcoat against blue night — was among the most reproduced Italian advertising images of the twentieth century. The Campari archives, now held in Sesto San Giovanni, contain the originals of this material alongside the company's full production and marketing history.

The Campari Group transferred its headquarters and production facilities to Sesto San Giovanni in the early twentieth century, consolidating production on the site where the Galleria now stands. The company moved its official headquarters to Sesto Calende in 2014, but the Sesto San Giovanni building retains the historic archive and the museum space.