According to Google Trends, the phrase “social distancing” was essentially unheard of before March — but Google Trends doesn’t go back to the 1600s.
After the plague swept through Florence in 1634, the scholar Francesco Rondinelli wrote about one of the mechanisms of adaptation of the Italian city: tiny display cases that allowed traders to pass the wine through a small gap in the wall to any direct contact with customers.
In 2015, 3 Florentus introduced the Associazione Buchette del Vino, also known as the Wine Vitrine Association, to catalog this historical phenomenon for generations. Five years later, when a fashionable pandemic swept through the city, only those windows are relevant, although some are being used for the intended purposes.
The Wine Windows Association says that an official tab has never been maintained on the number of vacancies in the city, but that they performed their own census, a complicated task, as many have been hidden or eliminated, and that there are about 150 in the old town of Florence. People. walls, while more than a hundred more have been cataloged beyond the walls and Tuscany, the domain in which the windows are supposedly unique. (A list and maps can be found on the Wine Buchette website).
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“The wine windows gradually became defunct, and many wooden ones were permanently lost in the floods of 1966,” Matteo Faglia, one of the association’s founders, told the site Insider. “We want to put a plaque by all the wine windows, as people tend to respect them more when they understand what they are and their history.”
How many are used again because the COVID-19 is a completely different account. “Just an active wine window before Covid-19. There are 4 right now,” Faglia told Food and Wine. According to some sources, many of those that have reopened since the coronavirus outbreak serve not only wine, but also food and other beverages.
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“The owners of the Wine Show of the Via dell’Isola delle Stinche of the Vivoli glacier in Florence have reactivated their window for the distribution of coffee and ice cream, but without wine,” wrote Diletta Corsini, co-founder of the association. , in a May article. “Two other nearby windows, the Osteria delle Brache in Piazza Peruzzi and the Babae show in Piazza Santo Spirito, took us back to the past to be used for their original purpose: the sale of socially remote wine.
In the case of the Osteria delle Brache, you can also have cocktails such as an Aperol spritz, a drink with a lot of Italian history, but not since the days of the Black Plague. The effects actually make it a fashionable Instagram killer operation.
And while Buchette del Vino’s online page doesn’t seem to be up-to-date, the organization also tracks display cases almost daily on Facebook. In fact, on July 30, the settlement proudly proclaimed, “Another gap has reopened!” It turns out that this terrible pandemic can also revive and maintain an incredible Tuscan tradition.
This story gave the impression in foodandwine.com.