Venice by Venezia: An Homage to Harry’s Bar

by Nicolò Michielin

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” wrote Oscar Wilde. And the birth of Harry’s Bar in Venice, perhaps the most famous bar in the world, is a story so steeped in romanticism that one might consider it worthy of the pages of the literary classics produced by the legendary writers who have often crowded its tables for nearly a century.

Giuseppe Cipriani opened the doors to Harry’s Bar on 13 May 1931, thanks to a combination of happenstance and generosity from a few years earlier.

Born in 1900 in Verona, Cipriani spent his early life in Germany. On the outbreak of World War I, the family would return to Italy, and Giuseppe became a pastry chef, before ultimately being called into the military, though by that time the war would soon be over. In the postwar depression, Cipriani took jobs where he could find them, as a waiter or bartender, in Italy and abroad, and eventually landed at the Hotel Europa in Venice, where he was quickly entrusted with managing the hotel bar, having been recognized for his rare empathy towards customers. That is where his life — and history — would change.

It was 1928 when a young Bostonian named Harry Pickering arrived in Venice, having made the trip with the purpose of overcoming his alcoholism, and checked into the Hotel Europa along with his wealthy aunt and her gigolo, plus Harry’s Pekingese. To the detriment of Harry’s stated mission, the group would spend ample time at the bar, drinking cocktails prepared by Cipriani.

But after a falling out, Harry's aunt suddenly returned to the States, leaving Harry alone, penniless, and stranded in Venice. Upon learning what had happened, Cipriani decided to help; no longer seeing Harry as a customer but simply a boy far from home and abandoned by his family, he lent the 21-year-old American most of his savings, 10,000 lire, so that he could pay the hotel bill and board a ship back across the Atlantic.

So, Harry left, but it would not be a final goodbye. Two years later, Harry unexpectedly returned to Venice, and he not only repaid the 10,000 lire, but gave Cipriani another 40,000 lire out of gratitude, which would enable Cipriani to open his own bar.

And so, Harry’s Bar was born, its existence standing as a symbol of kindness, and perhaps even of destiny, which crossed the paths of Cipriani and Pickering, the Italian and the American, over a glass on either side of a bar counter.

Getting started, Cipriani rented what was a former rope warehouse of four-and-a-half meters by nine at the end of Calle Vallaresso, which was found by his wife Giulietta. Cipriani had envisioned a location that was not for passing through but rather was a destination, and this spot at Calle Vallaresso was exactly so in the 1930s, before the bridge that connected it to Piazza San Marco or the vaporetto stop were built. In those days, the land in front of Harry's Bar degraded into the green and gray water of the lagoon across from Punta della Dogana.

From its opening, Harry's Bar entered the collective imagination of the 20th century, a place where writers, actors, artists, aristocrats, and politicians would congregate, finding a unique atmosphere that felt familiar and at the same time luxurious in the attention to the simplest details. Cipriani meticulously studied everything, to create a sensation that remains to this day. As for the drinks and dishes, some would become world famous for having been invented by Cipriani himself within those walls — most notably, the Bellini and the Carpaccio.

Based on prosecco and white peach juice, Cipriani created the Bellini in 1948. The drink took its name from the Venetian Renaissance painter Giambellino, born Giovanni Bellini, whose work was exhibited at Palazzo Ducale in Venice that year, as Cipriani saw the shades of the peach in his paintings and took inspiration. Cipriani said the Bellini was in celebration of a postwar peace that had been lacking for too long in the city and the nation.

There is also an art reference in the raw meat dish that was baptized Carpaccio, with the red of the meat reminding Cipriani of the canvases of Vittore Carpaccio, another artist of the Serenissima who lived between the 15th and 16th centuries. Legend has it that Cipriani invented the dish to satisfy the cravings of one of the many countesses who frequented the restaurant, garnishing it with a mustard and mayonnaise sauce, which the kitchen defined “universal” because it was good on both meat and fish.

The fame of the Bellini and the Carpaccio came to be such that it risks equaling or exceeding that of their namesakes, so much so that the artists’ museum labels at the Brera Art Gallery in Milan tell the intertwining of their history with that of Cipriani’s menu.

The recurring theme that links Harry's Bar with art demands mention of one of its most famous and loyal customers: Ernest Hemingway. In the winter of 1949, the iconic American writer had his own table reserved daily, where he wrote Across the River and into the Trees. Hemingway was so at home at Calle Vallaresso that he would invent a cocktail there, the Montgomery. Hemingway’s modified Dry Martini called for a 15:1 ratio of gin to vermouth — the same proportion, he would say, that English Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery demanded between his soldiers and the enemy before attacking in World War II.

Anybody who is anybody has been to Harry's Bar at least once, comfortably right alongside the countless who aren’t anybody in particular. Georges Braque, Truman Capote, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Peggy Guggenheim, Andy Warhol, and Orson Welles, who started his lunches with beer mugs full of champagne and ended them with rivers of whiskey. Royalty and heads of state, philosophers and intellectuals, writers and actors, rock stars and rappers; the list is long and distinguished.

Baron Philippe de Rothschild once said, “I can’t know which is the best restaurant in the world because I haven’t had the honor of visiting them all. But I can tell you one thing. There is a restaurant where I have always felt at home: Harry’s Bar in Venice.”

Harry's Bar is something more than a place to eat or drink. It's that soul that you perceive in its atmosphere. It's the perfect blend of a gala evening and the warmth of the table at home on a festive Sunday.

Today, some people entering the doors are not necessarily intent on catching a glimpse of an illustrious guest, but rather the man who has managed the place for more than six decades, Arrigo Cipriani, Giuseppe's son, who calls himself “the only person to have taken his name from a bar and not vice versa.” In reality, Mr. Cipriani, who turned 90 on 23 April, would have been called Harry, had it not been that in his year of birth, 1932, fascist laws prohibited Italians from giving their children Anglo-Saxon names.

Mr. Cipriani, who personifies his bar’s simple elegance, and is easily the world's most recognized modern-day Venetian, remains a guardian of almost a century of history of this city.

In 2001, Italy's Ministry of Cultural Heritage declared Harry's Bar a national landmark. But the history of places is made by its people.