Agresto

Censored as P.A.T. (typical agri-food product) by the Tuscan region in 2009, Agresto is a condiment obtained from the pressing of unripe grapes (harvested in late July or early August) and flavoured with mixtures of aromatic herbs.

Thanks to Lombardi e Visconti’s long research on this product, it has emerged that Agresto, already known in Classic times, was appreciated not only for its gastronomic properties but also for its medicinal properties (well described by Dioscorides). Moreover, it was widely used in medieval dishes, as well as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - as described by numerous written testimonies (the food historian JL Flandrier has calculated that Agresto was present in 42% of the recipes described in the famous book about medieval cuisine “Viandier de Taillevent”).

In this product category, Lombardi e Visconti included antique preparations, made with techniques that are often forgotten and traced with great effort in fragments of texts from ancient times, which constitute an object of research and of deep study.