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Bars and restaurants around the world are having to rethink the way they interact with customers during the pandemic. In the Italian city of Florence, some are looking to the past: using centuries-old wine windows to dole out food and drinks. Rising just above ground level, blink and you might miss these tiny openings, called “buchette del vino,” (literally “little wine holes”) in Italian. The small windows were used to sell wine-to-go during the Renaissance period, and were intended to be cheaper, direct-to-consumer alternatives to taverns and other drinking dens — not to mention a discreet way for merchants to avoid paying taxes on the alcoholic libations they were peddling. Those merchants were Florences elites, many of whom had the foot-tall windows built into street-facing walls of their palatial residences, usually next to the main entrance. Back in the 1500s, a number of the citys aristocrats were also major wine producers in the surrounding countryside. The “buchette” allowed them to trade (or rather, have servants do it for them) their spirits straight from their in-house cellars to basically anyone, with a reduced need for physical contact. In May, as Italy eased its two-months-long lockdown, several F&B businesses in Florence, who happened to be based in premises with existing buchette, decided to reopen them, capitalizing on the designs minimal-contact aspect. Wine, Aperol spritzes, ice creams and sandwiches have since been served through the holes, at a safe distance. Reviving a Florentine traditionGelateria Vivoli, one of Florences famous ice cream parlors, was one of the first businesses to make use of its buchette during the coronavirus pandemic (though a bistro named Babae should be credited as the initiator of the trend, having reinstated its buchetta in the summer of 2019). Its wine window features a grey stone frame around a tiny wooden hatch. “We chose to use our buchetta during Covid-19 both as a protective measure and to