We expect fragrances to represent us and make us dream and feel good. Finding your own perfume is quite challenging. Some people become attached to one scent and never change it, while others enjoy changing according to their mood or the season. In any case, finding the right fragrance is never easy unless you rely on a custom-made product.
Let's take a step back and learn about the origin and function of perfume, from its sacred to seductive purposes. The inventor of Eau de Cologne can be traced back to Giovanni Paolo Feminis, a Piedmontese who was born at the end of the 1600s and later emigrated to Cologne, Germany in search of fortune. There, he opened a distillery. In a time when perfumes were very intense, Feminis was inspired by the formula of the medicinal Queen of Hungary's Water, an alcoholic perfume containing tonic ingredients such as rosemary and later, citrus fruits. It is said that in previous centuries, he had looked after and made the no longer young Queen Isabella of Hungary more 'seductive', to the extent that the handsome and young Grand Duke of Lithuania fell in love with her and married her. This is the story from the writer Eleonora Recalcati, author of “Aqua Mirabilis: The Extraordinary Story of the Invention of Perfume” (Historiae Rizzoli, 2024).
"The elegant building on Obenmarspforten, in the heart of Cologne, which Giovanni moved the headquarters of his Maison to in 1723, now houses the Casa Farina Perfume Museum," writes the author in a note at the end of the book. "When I decided to tell this story and visited it, I followed the guide to the basement, where there is still the large table where Giovanni signed his letters, the ancient copper stills, and the bottles of different shapes, including the inevitable red tulip, which for the last three hundred and fifteen years has housed the Eau de Cologne Farina. Even today, an eighth-generation descendant of the family, Johann Maria Farina, continues to produce the same perfume as his ancestors, in addition to preserving the memory in the museum." ". . . Certain people, like Giovanni and Paolo, experience the highest point of an era, the moment in which everything changes. It was like this in the world of perfume between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century," he concludes.
In the wooded mountains of Val Vigezzo, young Giovanni Maria Farina discovers his special talent. He has a keen sense of smell, allowing him to recognise different scents in nature and in his family members. Giovanni's older cousin, Paolo Feminis, shares his passion for scents and they spend time together creating elixirs in a laboratory cellar. However, their paths diverge when Paolo leaves the valley to promote his citrus-based healing tonic, Aqua Mirabilis. Feeling abandoned, Giovanni's grandmother Caterina invites him to Venice, where he learns to apply the techniques of alcoholic distillation to create essences. There, he meets Rosalba Carriera, a renowned painter, who changes his life. By combining ancient herbalist recipes, Giovanni creates Aqua Mirabilis, a fresh and therapeutic perfume with notes of rosemary, lavender, citrus fruits, and orange blossom, marking the beginning of modern perfumery. His nephew, also named Giovanni Maria Farina, markets it as Eau admirable de Cologne and achieves European success.
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