When in Florence, keep your eyes down for a fragrant surprise.
I was always so eager to see the "big" things in Florence - joining queues for Brunelleschi's magnificent Duomo or revisiting one of my favourite paintings, Botticelli's Birth of Venus at the Uffizi - that I ignored my personal travel mantra: "Always look up/look down." And so, for 20 years of visits, I failed to see the discreet signage tiled into the entryway of an arched portal in a street just near Santa Maria Novella church. What lies within is a piece of living history, as important as the city's Renaissance architecture and art.
The Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella is almost certainly the world's oldest operating apothecary. It dates to the 13th century, when the Dominican friars attached to Santa Maria Novella church began to study the healing power of plants, growing them in the monastery gardens or collecting them from the Tuscan hills. They learned how to distil and infuse, creating floral and herbal waters for everything from warding off the plague to curing "hysteria" in women, supplying them to their fellow brothers and the community.
Under Cosimo de Medici, the study of medicine in Tuscany flourished and the demand for the monks' "cures" and herbal and floral waters grew. In 1533, they created Acqua Della Regina for Catherine de Medici who was to marry Henry II and later take the throne of France. Returning to the court with her essence, with its top notes of neroli and petitgrain, she ignited a fashion for cologne that swept Europe. In 1612, the monks turned one of the monastery's chapels into a herbal pharmacy open to the public.
Entry to the series of elaborately decorated rooms that make up Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella is via The Great Sales Hall, formerly the chapel of San Niccol, restored in the 1800s. Its vaulted ceiling is decorated with frescoes by Paolino Sarti depicting the (then) four known continents. Next to the Great Hall, the former sacristy of the church was used to store the perfumed waters. It has frescoes painted by Mariotto di Nardo in 1380, including a last supper, that (look up!) unusually depicts Christ and his disciples seated at a round rather than the traditional rectangular table.
These days, production has shifted to a facility on the outskirts of the city, but wander through the Erboristeria and there are glass cases displaying the old distillation apparatuses, weighty hand-painted glass vials for perfumes and extracts and ancient prescription books.
Despite its museum-like feel, the extraordinary art and the gilded luxury, this is very much still a commercial site and each fragrant room contains bottles of eau de parfums (including, 500 years later, Catherine de Medici's), hand-milled soaps and creams for sale. Apart from a few imported exotics, they are made from extracts of flowers, fruit and herbs from the hills around Florence. There's also a tea room in a cloister overlooking the walled monastery garden, where you can sip on tisanes and infusions.
But it is the "farmaceutica" aspect of Santa Maria that attracts me. After consultation with staff, they recommend a herbal formula for whatever ails you - from gas to menopause, many made to the monks' 13th-century recipes. You take your prescription to another room that looks like a typical old apothecary, where staff fetch your medicine. When I come, often jetlagged, I request the remedy for insomnia. Perhaps it's divine influence, but I never have such sweet sleep.
