When Giovanni de Munari decided to restructure his pharmacy some time ago he could never imagine what was expecting him. Finding a recipe for the long-life elixir is something that everybody thinks could happen only in fairy tales or in fiction movies.
But not in real life. Not until now.
De Munari’s shop is one of the oldest apothecaries in Italy and is situated in Asciano, near Siena.
There, behind the shelves, the pharmacist’s ancestors had hidden the recipe in the 18th century. He finally found it and, together with his wife, ha mixed the required ingredients following the directions indicated on the old piece of paper.
The resulting potion is essentially a Chianti-based elixir. ''They may not have known the names of the chemicals back then, but they were sure red wine, and Chianti in particular, was a boon for old age,'' de Munari suggested.
Recent discoveries have actually confirmed that the chemical substances contained in the red wine, in particular the anti-oxidants, help preventing heart problems and other age-related diseases.
The discovery will also become a good source of earnings: ''We achieved such a convincing result that we're now collaborating with a Treviso-based distillery to make the elixir on an industrial scale'' de Munari has enthusiastically declared.
(M.M.)
