My northern Italian great-aunt used to make Iced tea like her mother did:
2 quarts of boiled water, 5 tea bags, steep for about 10 min
Add one sprig of spearmint (about 4 - 6 leaves & stem) with your tea bags if you like mint
After 10 min remove the teabags, squeezing them out into the tea but not so hard that you break them, & remove the mint sprig.
While the tea is still very hot add:
3/4 to 1 cup of sugar (to your taste) stir well to incorporate the sugar (artificial sweetners can be substituted, but I don't use them so can't tell you how much to use)
Add to the tea the juice and pulp (not the rind or the chewy bits) of:
2 large juicy oranges, left to room temp
1 lime, room temp
1 lemon, room temp
If fruit is not room temperature, you can microwave it for a few SECONDS until it is warmish. You get more juice out of warm citrus fruit than cold, not sure why. You also get a bit more juice out of it if you roll the fruit between your hand and the table or countertop a few times before cutting it open, pressing it firmly.
Pour warm sweet tea and fruit juice over a full gallon pitcher of ice (which is about 2 quarts of water as it melts), and serve.
It is so refreshing! It is lovely the first day, but it actually tastes better if it sits overnight. If you plan to serve the next day, you can just add the 2 quarts of sweetened tea & juice to 2 quarts of cold water instead of over ice and put in the 'fridge over night. Before you serve the tea, stir it a little to get the fruit bits off the bottom.
You can garnish glasses with thin rounds of citrus fruit if you want it to look decorative for a dinner. Don't put the sliced citrus fruit with the peels on into the pitcher of tea, as the tea will become very bitter from the citrus oils in the zest. Cut the peels off the whole fruit with a sharp knife, and then slice the fruit into thin rounds before adding to the pitcher. Blood oranges look especially nice with the lime & lemon done that way.
We serve this all summer. One summer we invited a little neighbor girl, who was about 6 at the time, to come over and have a picnic type of dinner outdoors with all my kids.
I poured a nice glassful and then gave the tea to the child. She looked at the bits of fruit in her glass and said to me, quite politely, "Excuse me, Ma'am, but I can't drink this with all that crap floating in it."
I tried not to spray my tea out of my nose, and after swallowing explained that 'all that crap' was bits of lemons, limes and oranges! She drank some and liked it & asked for more. When I told her parents later that evening, I thought her mother was going to die of humiliation! Her momma looked at her poppa and he turned all red. Guess where she learned to talk like that?