Limone sul Garda, the lovely town on the Western banks of Lake Garda (province of Brescia) with less than one thousand inhabitants, recently took the international spotlight for the ‘longevity protein’ found in the blood of several of its citizens.
The story of the discovery of Apolypoprotein A-1 Milan began in 1979 when a railway employee, who was born in Limone but had lived in Milan for over 20 years, was hospitalized for a routine check-up.
The test results amazed the doctors: although the patient had very high cholesterol and triglyceride levels, he showed no major clinical symptoms and no damage to arteries and heart. Doctors thought this was very strange: incredible, in fact.
They decided to do more tests and discovered that the patient, his father, and daughter all had the same anomalous protein in their blood, which they called ‘Apolypoprotein A-1 Milan’ (named after the city in which it was discovered).
Limone, which is nestled in between the mountains and the lake, has always been an isolated frontier. Precisely this isolation, combined with a series of fortunate and fortuitous episodes, determined the birth of the famous ‘elixir’ in the blood of the locals.
