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France has long been regarded as the world capital of perfumery, but the story of modern fragrance began in many ways in Florence. For centuries, monks here extracted scents from flowers and herbs. Today, historic workshops, family-run perfume houses and unusual museums offer visitors the chance not only to explore the history of fragrance but also to create a perfume of their own.

The New York Times journalist Lisa Abend traveled to Florence with her mother for an autumn getaway, hoping to explore the city’s fragrant heritage and develop a signature scent.

One of the highlights of their itinerary was the famous Santa Maria Novella perfumery, whose history dates back to the Middle Ages. According to legend, its monks created a fragrance for Catherine de’ Medici when she left for France to marry the future king. The perfume was intended to protect her from the unpleasant smells of Paris, where modern sewer systems were still nonexistent in the 16th century.

For a deeper understanding of the art of perfumery, however, Abend chose the Lorenzo Villoresi Perfume Museum. Housed in a historic palazzo, the museum invites visitors to explore not only finished fragrances but also their individual ingredients, from rose and cinnamon to some rather unusual natural materials.

Visitors learn how individual components are blended to create the combinations that form a perfume’s top, middle and base notes. They can also compare natural and synthetic essences. For Abend, jasmine proved particularly memorable: its natural scent instantly transported her back to the flowers growing near a house where she once lived in Andalusia.

This, Villoresi explained, is the special power of fragrance: our sense of smell is closely connected to memory and can instantly take us back to places and experiences we thought we had long forgotten.

Villoresi himself came to perfumery through the study of classical philology and eventually created fragrances for celebrities including Billy Joel and Madonna. Inspiration, he says, can be found in mythology, travel and childhood fairy tales. The challenge is not so much to recreate a story as to capture its atmosphere and emotions.

Yet this traditional craft is gradually disappearing. Florence has fewer and fewer master perfumers, and with them, specialists who once made perfume bottles, leather cases and other accessories are also vanishing. Villoresi considers those who remain a genuine treasure.

Continuing her search for historic fragrances, Abend visited several perfume houses. Farmacia SS Annunziata 1561, founded in the 16th century, produces its own perfumes and cosmetics inspired by Florence’s artisanal traditions. At Antica Spezieria Erboristeria San Simone, whose history dates back to the 18th century, herbalist Fernanda Russo explained that shops of this kind once sold virtually everything that could be derived from plants: medicines, spices, pigments and aromatic preparations.

Today, the shop creates fragrances inspired by the city’s famous streets. One example is Tornabuoni, named after the neighborhood historically associated with Florence’s nobility. Its composition combines vetiver and amberwood for a restrained, elegant scent.

Florence is also home to younger perfume ventures. The family-owned company Aquaflor, founded in 2009, creates fragrances in a laboratory beneath a historic Renaissance palazzo. Its compositions include a perfume featuring cardamom and tobacco that reminded Abend of a Negroni cocktail, as well as home fragrances inspired by the Boboli Gardens, with their citrus trees, jasmine and roses.

Florence, however, smells of more than flowers and spices. When Abend asked perfumer Luca Fisichella which scents best captured the city’s character, he smiled and named two rather unexpected aromas: roasted meat and urine.

The final stop on the journey was a perfume-making workshop at Profumoir, where participants are guided through the process of creating their own compositions. Abend decided that her fragrance should capture the feeling of Florence in October.

First, she was presented with dozens of bottles bearing numbered labels, allowing her to choose scents without knowing their names. After several rounds of selection, five components remained: neroli, lilac, a tobacco-and-vanilla blend, and two varieties of amber.

The perfumer left Abend to determine the proportions herself. Both the master perfumer and a colleague approved the resulting blend, praising the richness of the amber and the freshness of the neroli. They agreed that the formula needed no further adjustments.

The essence was then mixed with distilled alcohol, and Abend was told that the finished fragrance would need to mature for three weeks. She chose a stopper made of Carrara marble for the bottle and gave her perfume an Italian name: Firenze in Ottobre — “Florence in October.”

Her composition contained none of the iris associated with the city, nor jasmine, Florence’s celebrated leather notes or even the unexpected scents the perfumer had identified as the city’s true olfactory signature. But by then, none of that mattered. The fragrance she had created would forever remind her of an autumn trip with her mother.

Perhaps that is the true art of perfumery: not simply reproducing the smells of a place, but preserving personal memories of it in just a few drops.

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