On the table: the Tuscan aperitivo, properly understood

The Italian aperitivo, in the popular imagination, has become something it never was: a stand-up dinner with a spritz. In Tuscany, it remains what it always was — small, deliberate, and unhurried.

At the houses we work with, the form is roughly this. A drink at six-thirty. Something cold, something bitter, something local. A handful of plates: a board of pecorino in three ages with miele di castagno, a small dish of olives still in their brine, fettunta with the new oil if it is November.

You do not eat to fill yourself. You eat to make the drink behave. Dinner, properly, is at nine.

Where to take it matters more than what you put on it. A loggia facing west. A long stone bench at the edge of the lawn. The corner of a kitchen, if it is October and the wind has come up. Each of our houses has, somewhere on the property, the obvious place. Ask the housekeeper. They know.