Florentine monks find 19th century recipe for cola drink

A recipe dating to the mid-19th century has 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, monks in the Italian city said on Wednesday.

The discovery was made during archive-cleaning work. According to Dominican friar Manuel Russo, a faded advertisement promoted a "fortifying wine elixir" made from coca leaves and cola nuts. He said the drink was among the pharmacy's best-selling products at the time.

Coca-Cola is generally considered to have been invented in 1886, when US pharmacist John Stith Pemberton 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.

The yellowed 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."

Its listed ingredients include 30 grams of cola nuts, 10 grams of Bolivian coca leaves and 1 litre of an alcoholic mixture.

According to the records, missionaries brought both the coca leaves and cola nuts from South America to Tuscany.

The exact recipe for Coca-Cola has long been 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.

• Toscana Oggi report, in Italian