Ooh! Ooh! Are you a good witch or a bad witch?
Strega is a special liquer from Italy. Named “witch,” it plays off of the idea that the town from which the product comes, Benevento, Italy (good wind) used to be named Malevanto, which means “bad wind,” in reference to the towns reputation for harboring witchcraft.
Two things about this. One, Strega has online ordering (currently only for Italy). Living in Georgia, I have no hope of ever being able to order spirits online, due to the obnoxious blue law stature of an otherwise pretty cool state. Two, when I lived in Colorado Springs, the rumor was that the reason so many devil worshipers supposedly lived there was that nearby Manitou Springs was the physical location of one of the few “gateways” to hell.
Really, I think the incubus aspects of The Springs had more to do with the urban planning of C-springs and prolific meth industry in the area, but it was fun to entertain the notion that the hills were very much alive with malicious forces. It added to the “island” feel one had when ensconced within a liberal campus in the midst of a highly conservative city in a mostly conservative state.
It also made the murder stories more interesting.
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1 scags // Jun 14, 2005 at 11:26 am
More on the subject of the malevolant past of certain Italian alcoholic potables. I just got back from the Chianti wine region, where I learned that the name comes from “clianti” meaning the clattery noise of war. In the dark ages, that area was always being fought over. One of the contenders was the Langobards, North German warlords. Their name means “long beards” and they had their women grow their hair long to truss us under their chins when their clans were making their way across the continant, and that gave the formidable appearance of them being twice the men. Castello di Verazzano is an old Langobard Chianti vintner that still pours a good glass of proof of the great spoils of conquest. One of the Verazzano’s was the guy who went exploring in the Hudson River, had the bridge to Staten Island named after him, and was ultimatey gobbled by cannibals in the Caribbean. Of course Chianti wineries were feudal estates until the 1960s. Since then they realized that the old rotgut in a basket-bottle that used to be a staple of the cheap college date, was not a viable product in today’s fine-wine market. So they learned new tricks from the French and the Californians, number one of which is to use only the low hanging grapes and drop the rest for fertilizer. The old men grape-pickers remember the days when all grapes were used, for quantity not quality. But nowdays, in the times of “Supertuscans” and the demands of international hemogenized gourmet tastes, certain sacrifices must be made. Every year at harvest time, with all those grapes being dropped to the dirt, the old men weep as they pick.
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