Giuseppe Cipriani, son of an Italian bricklayer, moved with his family to Verona during the First World War. He worked in a bakery there, took it over when the owner went to war, then sought work as a waiter after the bakery’s owner returned. Cipriani waited hotel tables in France, Belgium, and Italy changing jobs whenever he thought he’d learned enough. He worked in Venice at the Hotel Monaco then the Hotel Europa where its owner told him he was a fine waiter but would be an even better barman. In his years behind the Hotel Europa bar Cipriani thought of opening a bar as elegant as the hotel’s but in its own building rather than behind an intimidating hotel lobby and staff. As with many great ideas, he had very little money to carry it out.
Harry Pickering was a sad young American student who had come to Venice with his aunt and a dog to cure his alcoholism. Cipriani had doubts that sitting in his bar all day was the ideal cure but befriended the likable young man. Harry’s aunt abandoned him after two months leaving him alone with the dog and no money. This, as it turned out, cured his drinking. In a generous moment, Cipriani loaned Harry 10,000 Lira ($5,000 US) and sent him on his way thinking he’d never see him again. Two years later Pickering returned to pay back the loan, adding another 30,000 Lira to it.”Open a bar of your own for high society,” he told Cipriani. “Call it Harry’s Bar.”
Harry’s Bar, Venice Italy
Harry’s Bar opened in Venice on May 13, 1931. It enjoyed immediate success attracting the international and refined clientele who regularly came to Venice on holiday. Its first and only guestbook bears signatures of Arturo Toscanini, Guglielmo Marconi, Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and a host of others. Ernest Hemingway was a regular patron there and soon had a table of his own. He had a generous and overwhelming personality and mentioned the establishment many times in the novel he was writing: Across the River and Into the Trees.
Cipriani’s success grew over the years into a portfolio of hotel and restaurant holdings. Harry’s Bars can be found in New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Miami, Ibizia, Porto Cervo, Abu Dhabi, Istanbul, and Monte Carlo among other locations. Cipriani’s son, Arrigo, as close as a name could get to Harry in Italian, now heads the operation along with his grandson, Giuseppe.
In 1977, Harry’s Bar and American Grill in Century City, CA dreamed up a contest to capitalize on Hemingway’s literary references to Harry’s Bar. The rules were simple: write a one-page parody in the Hemingway style, mention Harry’s Bar, make it funny. The winner would receive round-trip tickets and dinner for two at Harry’s Bar in Florence, Italy. With various noted literary figures as judges, the contest drew thousands of entries and continued nearly 30 years. Here’s a sample:
The Foam Also Rises
The war had been over for many years but not for Davey O’Connell III. He was a soldier. Like his grandfather before him who fought bravely and with honor in the Irish Rebellion of 1916 and his father who’d struggled valiantly for just and worthy causes in the jungles of Panama and the mountains of Peru and the stark and windy and desolate prairies of northern Minnesota, he would always be a soldier. Justice was in the O’Connell blood. It wrote his life’s path for him.
He signaled for another beer. Holding down a stool at Harry’s Bar since early afternoon he’d been mulling his destiny as he steadily downed the Guinness brought to him in the voluptuous pint glass with a cloverleaf expertly drawn in the rising foam by the veteran barman. Davey could always count on Guinness, its dark and chewy texture nearly a meal in itself. He stared silently into foam so dense and creamy it could be cut into cubes and roasted like marshmallows, stared silently, searching for his future there.
He had no son. Who would carry on the O’Connell’s noble effort to make things right in the world? Certainly he should have found a beautiful and tender village maid from Switzerland or Burma or Pelican Rapids by now and brought his true successor into the world. It had slipped his mind. Somewhere in with the sniper rifles and the heavy ammunition cases and the camouflage paint and the leaking combat boots and days and nights of pounding rain and blowing sand and merciless insects and never quite enough to eat he had lost the thread of things. He needed to think. He had to act before the destiny looming before him became a dark and inescapable reality. He saw that fate clearly. To die. Alone. In the rain.