A recipe dating to the mid-19th century has just been found in the pharmacy of Saint Mark's Monastery in Florence that describes a beverage that could be a precursor to modern cola drinks, say monks in the Italian city.
The discovery was made during archive-cleaning work.
The yellowing recipe lists ingredients including 30g of cola nuts, 10g of Bolivian coca leaves and one litre of an alcoholic mixture.
According to Dominican friar Manuel Russo, the recipe is written on a faded advertisement that describes a "fortifying wine elixir" made from coca leaves and cola nuts.
The advertisement describes the fortifying wine elixir as a tonic intended to relieve physical and mental exhaustion, headaches and weakness associated with old age or "extraordinary exertion".
The drink was among the pharmacy's best-selling products at the time, he says.
According to the records, missionaries brought both the coca leaves and cola nuts from South America to Tuscany.
If you fancy making the drink at home, obtaining the ingredients will depend on where you live. You may be able to buy coca leaves though they are not available everywhere.
Beyond South America, most national laws do not distinguish between coca leaves and other substance containing cocaine, so possessing the coca leaf is prohibited.
Today's Coca-Cola is generally considered to have been invented in 1886, when pharmacist John Stith Pemberton in the United States created Pemberton's French Wine Coca, a tonic containing coca leaves and cola nuts.
When alcohol prohibition measures made the original formula impractical, Pemberton replaced the alcohol with water and sugar syrup, eventually creating what became Coca-Cola.
The newly discovered Tuscan recipe predates Pemberton's invention by several decades, although Russo stressed there is no evidence of any direct connection between the monastery's drink and the later beverage.
Meanwhile the exact recipe for Coca-Cola has long been – and remains – one of the world's best-known trade secrets.
The company says only a small number of employees know the complete formula, and they are bound by strict confidentiality agreements. Their identities are also kept secret.
A popular myth claims that only two people know the recipe and are never allowed to travel on the same aircraft. However, the company says this story is untrue.
According to Coca-Cola, Pemberton never wrote down the original formula himself. It was first committed to paper in 1919 and is now stored in a secure vault.
St Mark's Monastery, or Convento di San Marco, is one of Florence's best-known landmarks, famous for its early Renaissance frescoes by Fra Angelico.
Its Antica Farmacia di San Marco, founded in 1436, was among Florence's oldest pharmacies.
For centuries, Dominican monks supplied local residents with medicinal herbs, essences, elixirs and scented waters. The pharmacy no longer operates in its original form. – dpa
