GHIMPEN MAT - BITTER OF PINE'

Bitter liquor of mountain herbs and roots according to an ancient recipe

He was a handsome man, very kind and a demeanor too fine to those places and those times. He healed without reward anyone who needed his care. He had studied botany, herbal medicine and chemistry and sometimes he did some trouble with his experiments - as told by the great-grandmother. When he was about 30 years old, he played a heavy prank and from that day he went to live in one of the many farms in the mountains where he devoted his life exclusively to searching for herbs to prepare his medicines and concoctions. For this reason it was nicknamed “GHIMPEN MAT.”
September 1973 aunt Bepina gave to my father a glass jar, sealed with cork, corn leaves and beeswax, in which there were herbs and a piece of rolled paper. “Keep it – she said – that’s the only legacy of your ancestor Ghimpen Mat”. My father Vittorio opened the jar, took out the papyrus and peered it carefully: there was a map on one side and on the other a dialect poetry with a list of herbs and roots... the recipe of the “Amaro Ghimpen Mat”.