The tiny Italian town that drinks like Ancient Rome and Greece

The tiny Italian town that drinks like Ancient Rome and Greece Prisma by Dukas Presseagentur GmbH/Alamy The town that drinks like Ancient Rome and Greece Arquà Petrarca is known as the final resting place of a Renaissance patriarch – and the source of a fabled liquor whose name means "to live in bliss", made from the jujube fruit. Arquà Petrarca, as it has since been renamed, is still a small town of barely 2,000 residents – a "soft, quiet hamlet… in the deep umbridge of a green hill's shade", to quote Lord Byron, who visited the town on the Grand Tour. In Arquà Petrarca, you can still find one or two trees outside "almost every house", the Italian scholar Cristina Bignami writes in a brief history of the town's love of the jujube. It's that elusive taste Callegaro has tried to capture with his "brodo di Arquà", his attempt to recreate the infamous brodo di giuggiole that once stole the hearts of Renaissance drinkers.