This article appears in
Volume 24: The Slow Issue.

Slow,

Slow,
meditative and immersive travel allows us to refine our
lifestyles, adopting healthy or life-affirming habits and importing
them back into our daily lives. Consequently when it emerged in
2016 that more than one in ten inhabitants of the tiny Italian
hamlet of Acciaroli in Salerno lived to be over 100 years old,
travellers and scientists alike began wondering what we could

learn from them.

“When we reported our population statistics to the
Italian government, they were convinced we had got something
wrong,” says mayor Stefano Pisani. “But we have known for a long
time that there’s something special about Acciaroli and its
residents.”

After six months of research, the truth emerged. As lovers of
tobacco, wine and food, there was nothing spartan about the
Acciaroli way of life. Instead researchers identified rosemary as
the secret ingredient added to the otherwise classically
Mediterranean diet of this sleepy fishing town. Residents chew
rosemary raw, toss it into virtually every dish and consume the
local herb in large quantities.

Inspired by the rosemary-rich diet of these weather-worn
centenarians, avid traveller David Spencer-Percival set out on a
quest to bottle this secret to their longevity. Working with
botanical scientists in a pioneering extraction process,
Spencer-Percival sought to preserve the goodness of this wonder
herb by adding nothing but pure rosemary extract to sparkling
spring water.

The result is a true taste of Campania – bubbles that dance on
the tongue while the fragrant, gently medicinal notes of rosemary
refresh the senses. Clinical trials show that the benefits have
been bottled too. “The results of this research show there are
statistically reliable improvements in memory function thanks to
the ingestion of No 1 Rosemary Water,” says Dr Mark Moss. “The
shots act like a turbocharger for the brain.”

So while it might not be possible to bottle the Acciaroli
lifestyle entirely, it seems you can bottle some of the
benefits.