In a corner beneath the painted ceilings of the Santa Maria Novella perfume shop in Florence, away from the crowd of customers, an assistant took a bottle from a carved cabinet, sprayed a paper strip and held it under my nose. Citrus, rosemary and, I think, a little soap.
"This is Acqua della Regina," explained the manager, Alice Montano. "A recipe created for Catherine de' Medici herself."
Today all the glory of perfumery goes to France, but modern perfumery originated in Florence. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the boundaries between perfumes, medicines and prayer were blurred, and Tuscan monks were considered specialists in extracting aromas from the flowers and herbs that grew in monastery gardens. When Catherine de' Medici left her native city in the 16th century to marry the future king of France, the monks of the Santa Maria Novella monastery created a special fragrance for her, meant to protect her from the olfactory barbarism she was about to encounter.
Of course she needed perfume. In Paris there weren't even toilets back then!
— Alice Montano, manager of the Santa Maria Novella perfume shop
Several centuries later, the workshops of craftsmen who had inherited the perfume trade from medieval monks were bought up by international corporations. But, as The New York Times journalist discovered during an autumn trip to Florence, enough of the city's aromatic tradition has survived for a walk in its footsteps to be a pleasant way of getting to know the Tuscan capital.
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