The year was 1370, and even the shimmering canals of Venice brought no joy to Francesco Petrarch. Over the last two decades, the world-renowned scholar and poet had travelled the length and breadth of Italy. But with every passing year, he found himself retreating more from social life, seeking to escape the "ignorance" of his age.
"I escape the city like an exile," he wrote, "and choose to live in a solitary small village, in a pretty little house… where I spend my days completely calm, away from the tumult, the noise, the chores, continuously reading and writing.
Travelling west from the Venetian coast in search of this elusive paradise, Petrarch would have seen the shapes of the Euganean Hills rising over the broad, flat plain of the Po River Valley like beacons. Nestled in the heart of them, he found his Eden: the tiny village of Arquà.
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. Its medieval stone houses make a ramshackle ascent from the 11th-Century Church of Santa Maria Assunta, where Petrarch's tomb is proudly on display, to his frescoed villa that is surrounded by flowering fruit trees in spring.
Petrarch's house and tomb remain the main draw for this town, some 30km south of the university town of Padua, whose residents come to enjoy the landscape where Petrarch finally found peace. But locals here know that the landscape hides a second, lesser-known treasure that Petrarch no doubt would be fond of: the singularly wonderful giuggiole, or Italian jujube fruit.
Small, olive shaped or sometimes round, with a hard pit and a green and brown exterior, the jujube is a fruit of many flavours. Fresh, it tastes like a hard, woody apple – but ripened off the vine, it takes on a sweet, complex character that lends its flavour to a beloved local liquor: the brodo di giuggiole, or jujube broth.
Beloved by the elites of Petrarch's day, jujube brothwas once so famous that it gave birth to an idiom, first recorded in 1612: andare in brodo di giuggiole ("to go in jujube broth") – meaning to live in a state of bliss.
Today, though, after a long decline in jujube cultivation, this elusive liquor has been all but forgotten by most Italians – except the residents of this one, tiny hilltop town. Since the 1980s, a small group of entrepreneurs has since worked to remake the brodo di giuggiole as one of the world's most exclusive liquors and restore the jujube as the unforgettable flavour of Petrarch's favourite town.
On a grey day in early November, I travelled to Monselice, a town just outside the valley where Arquà lies, to meet
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