Club Barman dello Stretto | Francesco La Rosa

01

How this started

Claudio Patania — president of Club Barman dello Stretto, a Messina bartender association, and a professional flair bartender and mixology trainer — had seen my work on social media before he reached out. That led to content for the first Messina Cocktail Week in December 2024, covering the Messina territory across Club Barman and multiple local venues. It went well enough that the relationship kept going: I started working with Club Barman properly at the start of 2026.

Bartender in a black vest talking with a colleague behind the bar, mixing glass and Bacardi bottle on the counter

Club Barman dello Stretto

Client: Club Barman dello Stretto — a Messina bartender association that trains and certifies bartenders, led by president and trainer Claudio Patania
Where: Messina, Sicily — the association's own training bar, plus local venues
How it started: Inbound. Patania had followed the work on social before making contact, which led to coverage of the first Messina Cocktail Week in December 2024
Shoot dates: Two sessions at the school, 20 February and 14 May 2026, on a Sony A7 IV
Role: Photographer and videomaker — stills and video, plus the visual direction of the social output
Output: 36 photographs published here, a promotional spot, interviews, and street and local content
Ecosystem: Fabbri 1905 is a media sponsor of Club Barman dello Stretto — its mark appears on the club's own uniforms and across the bar mats, glassware and bottles in these frames. It sponsors the club; it is not a client of Francesco's

02

What the school actually is

The reason this is not "bar photography" is that Club Barman is a school before it is a bar. Its Mixology Master Class runs forty hours and ends in a practical and theoretical exam; the certificate is signed by the president and a second trainer, and the students photographed here are working towards it. That changes what there is to shoot. Alongside the drinks there is a classroom — theory sessions and handwritten fermentation notes, sensory tastings, pours measured against a graduated cylinder, ice cut and cleared by hand, and flair practised with engraved tins.

Photographing an association is also different from photographing a venue. A bar sells an evening; a school sells competence, and competence has to be visible in the frame — a measure being checked, a strainer laid out in order, a certificate held up at the end. The set was built to be usable across the whole year rather than tied to one night, which is what a membership organisation needs from its own images.

03

How I approached it

Club Barman is a professional, technical subject — training, masterclasses, mixology — and the brief was to make that feel social and accessible without dumbing it down. That meant moving between three registers: interviews that give the organisation a human voice, street and local content that puts it in the city rather than behind a bar counter, and a promotional spot built to explain plainly what Club Barman actually is. The goal throughout was authority through familiarity — content built to make people in Messina recognise the name, not just see a nice video.

04