The Cabinet: Strega

Incorporating Yellow Chartreuse

🛍️VISIT the SPIRITS STORE. You will find a range of amazing special offers on premium booze, including FREE P&P on all orders of Mama Waty light rum + Orancia orange liqueur. By an amazing coincidence these are precisely the two bottles you will need to make this Friday’s cocktail. Simply enter the code RICHARD at checkout.🛍️

~ STREGA ~
Proprietary herbal liqueur from Italy / 40% ABV / c£20-30+ for 700ml
Friends with: Gin, vermouth, sherry, but then aren’t we all? Brandy, apple brandy, Scotch, rye (especially), mezcal and tequila. Aperol, Cynar, amari in general, Suze. Cacao. Cinnamon. Lemon, strawberries, pineapple, grapefruit. Yellow Chartreuse.

IN the August of 1944, around a year into the Allied forces’ invasion of Italy, the British intelligence officer Norman Lewis received an order to move from Naples to Benevento - a small town 40km or so to the north-east. The small detachment of Canadian soldiers who had been stationed there were moving out. Their replacements weren’t due for a couple of weeks. So Lewis was told to keep an eye on things for a while until the new ones arrived.

He found Benevento’s 50,000 or so residents living in post-apocalyptic conditions. The entire population wore the black of mourning. American B-17s had carpet-bombed the town the previous year - and only one in five houses had been left standing. Smallpox and typhoid had broken out. Bandits made frequent raids. “The poverty of these people is beyond belief,” wrote Lewis in his diary, published after the war as Naples ‘44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth (Eland). “To all intents and purposes we might as well be living in the Middle Ages.” One of his most disturbing encounters was with an orphaned girl, 12, who had turned to prostution. The local boys, meanwhile, had developed a macabre pastime. They would capture bats, douse them in petrol, set them on fire and release them into the sky, so they could watch them burn to death in mid-air.

Next time someone complains about modern boys spending too much time playing Nintendo, remember - this is the alternative.