This story was originally published in our Mar/Apr 2023 issue. Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.
Whoever studies the history of medicine finds L’Orvietan,” says Lamberto Bernardini. In his laboratory in Orvieto, Italy, a medieval hill town famous for its soaring duomo, that history is all around. Bernardini’s vaulted, frescoed space dates to the 1200s. One of the rooms in his lab is a museum-like space filled with historic books and framed antique letters, advertisements, and certificates. Centuries-old apothecary jars line the wooden shelves, their labels hand-painted in Italian script: angelica, genziana, mirra. Separated by a glass wall, the other room could be a medieval alchemist’s studio were it not for the modern stainless steel vats, which sit amid rows of glass bottles and stacks of cartons and labels.
It’s here that Bernardini brews up his 21st-century version of an old and storied recipe. Through a hobby that became a passion that became a vocation, he’s revived a 17th-century formula for L’Orvietan, an herbal antidote and cure-all that was known throughout Europe and Britain. The remedy even made it as far as North America in the hands of missionaries and explorers: At Michigan’s Colonial Michilimackinac historic site, a lead cap found in the excavation of a 1700s rowhouse was recently identified as the lid to a L’Orvietan bottle.
