Realino Mazzotta, founder of the Amaro Salento company, recalls that as a child in the family bar there was an herbal liqueur of whose recipe no trace remains either written or oral. Around the middle of the last century, home production of various liqueurs and rosoli was a common activity in Salento. The peasant world of the time was not familiar with the phenomenon of the commercialization of spirits. Only in some bars was it possible to taste, in particular, liqueurs made by hand from the maceration of native herbs and roots. These were mainly used to lengthen 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. A specialty much loved by the American soldiers present in the village after the Liberation. The friar had handed over the secret recipe to some public business owners, including the bar Venezia founded in the 1940s by Papa Raffaele. He began from that moment a slow but continuous investigation to keep alive a spiritual contact with his father, going through the fields and along the Ionian coast to collect the rare herbs.
