Realino Mazzotta, founder of the Amaro Salento company, remembers that when he was a child, there was an herbal liqueur in the family bar, of whose recipe no trace remains, either written or oral. Around the middle of the last century, the home production of various liqueurs and rosolios was a common activity in the Salento region. The peasant world of the time was not familiar with the commercialisation of spirits. Only in a few bars was it possible to taste liqueurs made by hand from the maceration of indigenous herbs and roots. These were mainly used to elongate and 'correct' coffee. Using a recipe suggested by a monk from the nearby convent of the Friars Minor of St Joseph of Cupertino, Papa Raffaele produced a bitter liqueur that he used to serve 'corrected' coffee. It was a speciality much loved by the American soldiers present in the village after the Liberation. The friar had handed over the secret recipe to a number of public business owners, including the bar Venezia founded in the 1940s by father Raffaele. From that moment on, he began a slow but continuous investigation to keep in touch spiritually with his father, travelling through the fields and along the Ionian coast to collect the rare herbs.
