From tonsils to diuresis, the “healing qualities” of wine for papal archaeologists of yore

If the Romans watered it down so that it would penetrate “more easily into all parts of the body”, centuries past each wine was also recognized as having “special curative qualities such as benefiting mouth ulcers, tonsils, purulent ears, or stimulating diuresis, adjusting the stomach, stopping the spitting of blood.” Listing them is the Sicilian physician-philosopher Giacomo Profetto, a papal archiater at the time of Paul III, in his treatise “On the nature of different kinds of wine” (“De diversorum vini generum natura”), a “literary jewel” of sixteenth-century Italian written in the form of a dialogue, which opens with a hymn to Bacchus and pleasure, while recommending moderate consumption, and in which all the knowledge about wine - literary, historical, therapeutic - produced up to that time is condensed: among its pages, it is possible to find not only geography of the wines then known, with the listing of their salient qualities and properties but also a “science of wine” rooted in philosophy, medicine, astronomy, mythology and morality. An exceptional text, of which scholar Lucio Coco edited the first Italian edition.
The papal archiatrician is, even today, the Pope’s personal physician. Profetus was of Paul III, namely Alessandro Farnese (Pope from 1534 to 1549), portrayed by Titian, who, while opposing the Protestant Reformation by instituting the Inquisition, excommunicating England's King Henry VIII, convening the Council of Trent and founding the Jesuits, was also among the greatest patrons of the Renaissance, commissioner of Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel and creator of the Farnese collection in Rome, among the most important in Italy and Europe, the one who elected Pietro Bembo cardinal, author of the most important grammar in the entire history of Italian, namely the “Prose nelle quali si ragiona della volgar lingua” (1525), and to whom Niccolò Copernicus dedicated his work “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium”. A character among the most famous in history also remembered for allowing some vices to men to endure existence, also mentioned many times by WineNews, in telling the story of Vernaccia di San Gimignano, among the oldest wines in Italy, undisputed “queen” of tables and banquets of popes and kings, a “royal” and “precious” white wine as Sante Lancerio, who of Paul III was, not surprisingly, the “bottle man”, also describes it. And at a time when philosophy, medicine, astronomy and morality were continually intertwined, wine, a “sacred beverage”, was also treated and studied for its curative virtues, in the manner of a medicine capable of healing or harming depending on its use, a magical and mysterious juice that, in its millennial history, has never ceased to fascinate.
Lucio Coco author of the Italian edition of the treatise (Leo S. Olschki Publishing House, December 2024, pp. 112, cover price 15 euros), is editor of important editions of texts by Church Fathers such as John Chrysostom, Evagrius Ponticus, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa. In addition, he is engaged in the study of Russian spirituality and literature, and on Byzantine literary texts. He also edited the publication of the “Encomium of Wine” (“Laus Vini,” Leo S. Olschki Publishing House, 2018, pp.24, cover price 6 euros) in which the Byzantine intellectual Michael Psellus sings the praises of this beverage that was God’s first gift to mankind after the Flood, affirming its therapeutic properties that benefit those who are healthy for the preservation of health, and which turns out to be “a consolation for those who are depressed and a cure for those who are sick”, always censuring excess, whereby the commendation thus finds its moral justification in a lifestyle marked by composure and sobriety.