At the table
Aperitivo, and what comes with the drink
A drink between seven and nine that arrives with food attached. How much food depends on the city, and in Milan it can replace dinner.
Aperitivo is the hour between finishing work and eating dinner. You order a drink, something to eat arrives with it, and the something is included in the price of the drink.
It is one of the easiest things to get right as a visitor, and one of the most pleasant, because it happens outdoors, it requires no booking, and it fills the awkward gap between a museum closing and a kitchen opening.
When
Roughly 18.30 to 21.00, with the crowd thickest around 19.30. It ends when people leave for dinner, which is the point of it: aperitivo opens the appetite rather than satisfying it.
That timing is also why it solves a problem visitors keep running into. Kitchens do not serve at seven. Bars do aperitivo at seven. See when Italians eat for the rest of the clock.
What to order
Spritz is the default: Aperol for the orange one and lighter bitterness, Campari for the red one and considerably more. Negroni is gin, vermouth and Campari, stirred and strong. Americano is the same without the gin.
Also entirely normal: a glass of white wine, a beer, or a crodino or sanbitter, the bitter non-alcoholic reds that come in small bottles and are what a lot of people drink when they are driving.
You order at the bar or from the table. If there is table service outside, the price will reflect it, in the same way it does at any Italian bar.
What arrives with it
This is the part that varies by geography and it is worth knowing before you plan your evening around it.
In Rome and most of the south, expect crisps, olives, maybe some cubes of cheese or a few pieces of pizza bianca. Enough to take the edge off. You are going to dinner afterwards.
In Milan and much of the north, it can be a full buffet: pasta salads, rice, focaccia, cured meats, sometimes a hot dish. You pay for the drink and eat from the table as much as is decent. This is the version people mean when they say apericena, a word built out of aperitivo and cena, dinner.
Apericena is a real thing and also a slightly disdained one. Plenty of Italians consider it a northern invention and a students' dinner rather than a proper meal, and you will hear it said with an eye-roll. It is also extremely popular, which is how most disdained things work.
The etiquette, which is light
Take a plate, take a reasonable amount, go back if you want more. Loading a dinner plate into a tower on the first visit is the thing that gets noticed.
The buffet is included with the drink. A second drink does not usually cost you a second entry fee, though in a few places aperitivo is sold as a fixed price that includes one drink and the food, and that will be stated.
You are not expected to tip, and the coperto does not apply here either, because you are standing at a bar rather than sitting at a laid table.
Where to go
The same test as everywhere else: look for locals who have clearly come from work, and for a bar that is busy at seven rather than one advertising aperitivo in English.
In summer this happens outside, in a piazza, and it goes on until the light fails. It is, on a warm evening, the best hour of the Italian day.