Of love and other sweetness

Amaretto is always linked to love stories; from the soft cake of Mombaruzzo, born of the love between the bursar and the confectioner of the Savoy court, to the liqueur, which was born of the painter Bernardino Luini’s passion for a beautiful innkeeper. At the beginning of the 1500s, in fact, Luini was entrusted with the creation of frescoes for the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Miracles: a huge job that could definitively consecrate his career but also required him to stay a long time away from home. The choice was swift: the artist packed his bags and set off bound for a modest guesthouse right next to the shrine. The owner of the inn liked this quiet man, always immersed in his art, so different from his usual customers; and Luini soon began to love that smiling girl who was the first person he saw in the morning and the last person he saw in the evening, the only one who made him feel a little less far from home. From morning to morning, the most important moment came, that of painting the Blessed Virgin herself; and Luini decided precisely to ask her, the woman who had made that new and distant place a home, to be his model. So it was that the innkeeper discovered herself immortal on the walls of the Sanctuary: and so it was that, thrilled, she gave that painter from Milan a bottle of her special liqueur, made of almonds infused in alcohol and brandy…