Bar Volare, Bologna

Go back in time in serious style.

Retro and kitschy and great fun; July 2025.

I was in Italy and in search of a Negroni. Hardly an impossible task — my biggest issue was narrowing down the thousands of nearby options to somewhere that wasn’t too loud and looked like it might have space. Overwhelmed by the options on GoogleMaps, I took to the streets and decided to follow my nose.

Apparently my nose is as keen on typography as the rest of me, because within a few minutes I was standing outside Bar Volare, drawn in by the Campari-like font they’d chosen for their sign. On the street was a selection of bars covered in red ‘velvet’ table cloths, and behind the plate glass window I could see barmen in terrible Hawaiian shirts, and the occasional puff of smoke filling the joint, making me wonder if my contact lenses had dried out.