Besides being essential for the physical survival of mankind, food certainly has a strong symbolic value that, already in primitive societies, was expressed, for example, with the consumption of meat of totemic animals.

In the Christian civilization, bread and wine played a central role in liturgical celebrations, but were also, simultaneously, the protagonists of daily meals.

Both profiles are present in the Athenaeum historical documents of the seventeenth century.

Bread and wine, not only are part of the daily diet of Mediterranean peoples but are also present in the preparation of drugs, both in Western medicine and in the exotic Persian pharmacopoeia.

And it is here that one can see how the wine, banned in the Islamic tradition, also has a pharmaceutical application, for which the therapeutic purpose can justify the infringement of the religious precept.

A similar phenomenon is recorded in the grant, by the Church, of licenses for consumption of meat during Lent, related to the state of health of applicants.

Meanwhile, the importance of bread and wine was such that, during the seventeenth century, the directors of the Collegio della Sapienza Nuova thought it was useful to record their purchase and use in specific documents.

Such meticulous care it is possibly related to the severe economic difficulties of the century, a century of 'crisis' that, between famines, epidemics and wars, did not spare the Mediterranean peoples in general, and Perugia in particular.