L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JULY 9, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 24 L'Italo-Americano I n t h e s o u t h e r n Marche, in the hill country of the Piceno and the Fermano and up toward the Sibillini mountains, there is a clear, fierce little spirit that most Italians outside the region n e v e r t a s t e d : m i s t r à , a n anise distillate so dry it can m a k e s a m b u c a s e e m l i k e syrup. It is the most austere member of a sweet family, drunk above all in caffè cor- retto, though plenty of people t a k e i t n e a t a f t e r a h e a v y meal, and a few still cut it with cold water and watch it cloud over in the glass, the way the Greeks do with ouzo and the southern French with pastis. At around forty-two degrees of alcohol, it certainly isn't a light drink. The name is where things turn curious, because nobody in the Marche quite agrees on what it means. Ask a home distiller, and he will shrug and tell you it is some old dialect word whose sense has simply been lost. Open a his- t o r y b o o k , t h o u g h , a n d a grander tale appears: mistrà seems to take its name from M y s t r a s , a t o w n n e a r a n c i e n t S p a r t a t h a t t h e R e p u b l i c o f V e n i c e h e l d between 1687 and 1715, where Venetian sailors first tried G r e e k o u z o , c a r r i e d i t home, and christened it after the city they had taken. For a while, it was the liqueur of the Serenissima; then Austrian and French rule pushed it out of fashion in the Veneto, and it drifted south, along the trade routes, to the Adriatic Marche, which is why old- timers there still sometimes call it il liquore dei mari- nai, the sailors' liquor. What the Marche did with it was make it entirely their own, so while the Greeks dis- tilled from grain, local farm- e r s u s e d w h a t t h e y h a d , wine, turning their surplus into clear alcohol, and marry- ing it to the fragrant green anise that grows around Cas- tignano, in the Piceno. Just to let you know, this variety of anise is so special that it earned its own Slow Food presidio. Anise, let's be clear, is the whole soul of the drink: i t s g e n t l e r c o u s i n , t h e anisetta that Silvio Melet- t i made famous in Ascoli from 1870, coaxes the same flower toward sweetness; mistrà takes it the other way, into something perfumed, bracing, and bone-dry. Curiously, and for most of its life, though, mistrà was not bought, it was made at home at the edges of the law. The reason was the plainest imaginable: there was a tax on distilled spirits, and the farmers' answer was simply not to declare what they were doing. Coppersmiths roamed t h e v i l l a g e s b u i l d i n g t h e stills, and on winter nights the distillers went house to house with the alambicco on their backs, helping each family turn its leftover wine i n t o s o m e t h i n g w a r m e r . Winter was the season for it: the cold, they said, helped the distillation. Every house- hold guarded its own recipe, and a good many guard it still. That world has not quite vanished, which is the lovely part. In Petritoli , in the province of Fermo, a young f a r m e r n a m e d N i c o l a Roberti distills mistrà on the same fifty-year-old cop- per still his grandfather once carried by bicycle from door to door (the grandfather, now ninety, started at twel- ve), and he has given his tiny operation the only honest n a m e f o r i t : D i s t i l l e r i a Clandestina. I mean, what else would you call it? He makes perhaps fifteen bottles at a time… barely enough for himself, a few friends, and a couple of restaurants in the hills. But that's the essence of mistrà: small batches, no shared rulebook, no discipli- nare, no certified method; there is a man, a copper still, the anise, a recipe handed down, and a whole lot of tra- dition. T h e o l d c r a f t h a d i t s secrets and its oddities, too: for example, the testa and the coda, that is, the toxic first and last runs off the still, were once rubbed into the skin at the end of a working day, in the belief that they cooled and loosened tired muscles. Not, we should add, a use anyone would recom- mend now. A n d t h e n t h e r e i s t h e other mistrà, the one in the elegant bottle. In 1868, a herbalist named Girolamo Varnelli, up at Cupi di Visso in the Sibillini, began making t h e s p i r i t a s a m e d i c i n e against the malarial fevers that tormented the shep - herds driving their flocks down to the Maremma. His son Antonio moved the dis- tillery to Pievebovigliana and refined the rough country recipe into something poli- s h e d : V a r n e l l i , t h e a n i c e secco speciale, the bottle that still carries the name of these h i l l s o u t i n t o t h e w o r l d . A l o n g s i d e i t , t h e R o m a n house of Pallini sends a mis- trà to the wider market, and the Marche and Lazio have since had the drink written into Italy's roll of traditional products: official recognition, at last, for something that spent most of its history hid- ing from officials. And here it reaches across the ocean, because anise is a flavor you may know very w e l l : y o u f i n d i t i n t h e a n i s e t t e p o u r e d i n t o t h e Christmas coffee, in the piz- zelle pressed on the good iron, or in the licorice scent of a grandmother's kitchen in D e c e m b e r . M i s t r à i s t h e rough mountain ancestor of all that, the homemade and half-secret version of a taste that crossed the Atlantic in so many trunks, hidden in so many memories. Most peo- ple will never find a bottle, as you nearly have to know a family in the Piceno to be h a n d e d a g l a s s , b u t t h a t , when you think about it, is rather the whole point of it: a fierce, clear spirit that was never really meant to be sold, o n l y m a d e , s h a r e d , a n d poured – generously – into someone's coffee. GIULIA FRANCESCHINI The sailors' liquor: how a Greek spirit became a Marche secret HERITAGE HISTORY IDENTITY TRADITIONS Mistrà, the anise-flavored spirit that became one of the Marche region's most distinctive traditional liqueurs, is often enjoyed neat, diluted with water, or added to coffee (Image generated using Adobe Illustrator AI)

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