Disaronno, a 500-year legend

To celebrate an anniversary, you need a birthday, and after 500 years, exact dates become a little hazy. However, handily, somebody in America designated the 19th of April as National Amaretto Day, so by extension, "Disaronno Day" and the start of the brand's anniversary celebrations.

That's the day and month covered, but what about the year? Legend has it that what was originally called Amaretto di Saronno, literally 'Amaretto of Saronno,' was created by a young local innkeeper in 1525 in the small town of Saronno in Lombardy, Italy.

The good people of Saronno have been generous benefactors to their ornate Santuario della Beata Vergine dei Miracoli (Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Miracles), the church that's grown from the original shrine to a "miracle," built towards the turn of the 15th century. Over the decades, the sacred building was embellished by local craftsmen, and a bell tower added. Soon after this, Bernardino Luini, an artist from Leonardo da Vinci's school of art, was commissioned to fresco the main chapel and antepresbytery. It was while he was painting this fresco that Luini chose the beautiful innkeeper as a model for his portrait of the Madonna, which can still be viewed in the Chapel of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Saronno.

Chapel of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Saronno (photographed by yours truly).

Legend has it that the young innkeeper and artist's model made a homemade liqueur for her own recipe known as amaretto. Commercial production of Amaretto di Saronno, using a recipe believed to have been passed down from the innkeeper, was started by the Reina family soon after 1900 when Domenico Reina opened a store named "Domenico Reina Coloniali" in the main square of Saronno. That shop, where the liqueur and other products were made and sold, became the foundation for the modern-day ILLVA Saronno company, which still produces Disaronno in the town of Saronno.

The Reina family's shop in Saronno.

Some cynics may say that Disaronno Amaretto dates from the 20th century when the Reina family started making the liqueur after opening their shop, so in 2025, it is no more than 125 years old. However, we like the legend and the excuse to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of one of the world's classic liqueurs and visit what is a beautiful church. That's Paloma and I posing outside the church in November 2019 after visiting Augusto Reina, the former CEO of Illva Saronno, and his family's distillery.