Centuries before self-help sections buckled under the weight of “blue zone” guides and multimillionaires mainlined the blood of their sons in a quest for extended life, a Venetian nobleman named Alvise (Luigi) Cornaro was forty and exhausted: he had spent decades gormandizing, losing himself in the lees of wine, and seeking out sensual excess as if it were his last night on earth. At the advice of a doctor, who said he “must either chuse a Regimen, or Death”, he chose the former: a “temperate and orderly life”. In the 1550s, when he was in his ninth decade, Cornaro wrote a guide to aging well, which was translated into English in 1702 as Sure and Certain Methods of Attaining a Long and Healthful Life. He survived until 98 or 102 — the longer he lived, the more he seemed to exaggerate his age — enough time to see several subsequent editions published.

“We become Old, before we have been able to taste the Pleasure of being Young”, writes Cornaro at the beginning of his treatise, “and the Time which ought to be the Summer of our Lives, is often the beginning of their Winter.” There is thankfully a solution, which keeps wrinkles away and gray hairs at bay until a “whole Century” is “run out”: caloric restriction. He chose to “eat nothing but what was good, and that in a small Quantity”, namely “Bread Soup, new-laid Eggs, Veal, Kid, Mutton, Partridges, Pullets, and Pigeons”. His definition of sober living, however, never excludes wine — which is “Mother’s Milk to old Men” — but he recommends adding ice to your glass and going dry in July and August.

One of the most influential Renaissance lifestyle treatises, Sure and Certain Methods found admirers for centuries to come. Writing in 1711, Joseph Addison thought that Cornaro’s death itself was tempered by his way of living: he “died without pain or agony, and like one who falls asleep”. Proof of the Italian’s enduring reputation — as if even that, too, was prolonged by bread soup — the American poet John Witt Randall penned an 1856 ode to Cornaro’s seemingly eternal youth: “With thine eleven grandchildren met, / Thou couldst at will become the boy”. Not everyone was so convinced. In Twilight of the Idols (1888), Friedrich Nietzsche argued that “there is scarcely a single book (the Bible of course excepted) that has worked more mischief, shortened more lives”. In this critique, Cornaro mistook effect for cause. It was Cornaro’s slow metabolism that made him sick in the first place, says Nietzsche, and which ultimately led to his old age. And it was Cornaro’s lifestyle (first as glutton, then ascetic) that selected his diet, not vice versa. For the German philosopher, prescriptive nutrition as well as Christian moral dicta suffer from Cornarism — both regimes promise a form of extended life (longevity, eternity) by prohibiting some of the very things that make it worth living in the first place.