The Sunday Digest 086
You can save it for tomorrow — we won't be offended.
Welcome to The Sunday Digest — a free Sunday newsletter featuring long (and some short) reads, original columns, things I’ve saved over the last week, relaxing playlists, episodes releases, exclusive product drops, and more. Yes, you can reply to this email. I’d love to hear from you. Or, if podcasts are more your speed on Sundays, we’ve got that too.
Before we get into this week’s Sunday Digest, I wanted to reiterate something you may have already seen on Instagram: Retail Therapy now has its own separate Substack where you’ll get regular listener digests, standalone columns, product notifications, wishlists, and more. While it isn’t much now, that will change very soon. Please subscribe!
Sunday Read: At Rome’s Beloved Bar San Calisto, That’ll Be €3.50 for Your Spritz
by Andrea Strafile for Punch Drink
I have the absolute pleasure of being invited to a wedding in Tuscany this summer which means we’ve been in planning mode for what feels like months.
When we last went to Italy in September 2022, I told my wife, “We absolutely cannot buy a bunch of wine after this Chianti tour.” For fear of seeing prices that made my heart stop like in Napa, I spent most of the day thinking about how we were going to slyly avoid the whole “So do you want to sign up for a wine subscription with us at the end of the tour?” thing.
But when they handed us the price list after our fourth stop, well, I nearly fell over (and not from the chianti). To my delighted surprise, the most expensive bottle on the list was $80, with most of the other bottles falling between $20-$40 which music to our Napa-ruined ears. While we didn’t subscribe to anything, we did order a case. Or two.
This year, however? We may need to shift our focus from inexpensive wine to inexpensive spritzes in Rome.
Though it looks like a postcard, Bar San Calisto is as authentic a neighborhood bar as you’ll find in Rome. It was founded in 1969 by Marcello Forti who, like many in Rome, came to the city from Abruzzo, a mostly rural region not far from Italy’s capital. Forti took over the space that had been open since the 1930s, but had never fared particularly well. Forti had been working as a cook in a restaurant in Trastevere, but took the opportunity to fulfill a dream of having something of his own: For 55 years he has sat behind the cash register every day, and still makes the ice cream that is served—summer and winter—at the age of 78.
Read in full here.
The Sunday Haiku: “Why am I always more tired after having more time off?”
A three-day weekend—
time for a reset button,
but probably not.
New Episode › Retail Therapy 076: Bromakase Dinner After Golf
A look at "bromakase" aka bros making nice restaurants into decadent money-fueled endeavors, Randy is now America's premier sundress expert, off-the-path golf apparel and equipment companies, mini cocktails (shots?), a new spritz of the summer entry, Scandinavian sleeping, being sober curious, young men loving expensive cologne, wishlist items, and more.
Listen to Retail Therapy on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube (see above), and anywhere else podcasts are found. And don’t forget to subscribe to Retail Therapy’s new Substack here:
Things I Saved This Week
Supplemental Reading
This week on Washed Weekly, I wrote about my experience in The Sphere for the first night of Dead & Company’s run.
I also wrote about some takeaways of a year of record collecting.
Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to Retail Therapy on Substack. Duh.
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