Venezia Giardini Segreti by Profumo Italia: Fragrance from an alternate universe

Rose and jasmine: seduction and beauty. Herbs: cuisine and healing. Myrrh: the Orient and the sacred. Ambergris: the sea.

Venezia Giardini Segreti (Venice Secret Gardens), the first of AbdesSalaam Attar’s tributes to Italian cities, springs from the vivid, romantic world imagined by the Venetian Hugo Pratt in one of his graphic novels about the gentleman sailor Corto Maltese, The Fable of Venice (to read it in Italian, click here).

“When Venetians grow tired of established authorities, they walk to these three secret places and, opening the doors that are in the bottom of these courts, they go away forever into beautiful places and other stories.”

Perfumes are those secret doors leading to “beautiful places and other stories”. And the story told by Venezia Giardini Segreti is that of an alternate-universe history of fragrance. What if Catherine de’ Medici hadn’t brought the refinement of Renaissance Italy perfumery to France? What if perfume hadn’t become French? In this alternate universe, monks, alchemists and princes perfected the art in Italy, with all the ingredients from the Orient funneled through Venice. Perfume was never severed from its function in healing and magic. It never became a luxury product – a fetishisized commodity – to be touted by fashion brands…

AbdesSalaam Attar hails from that alternate universe. A Frenchman by birth and a traveler, he has undertaken the journey of fragrance backward, eastward, toward the origin and the Orient, via Italy. His Venezia Giardini Segreti does not attempt the dazzling technical feats of contemporary, French-trained perfumers but – I’ve written this before about his work – it nevertheless springs from an age-old culture of scent.

The ingredients he brings together are harmonious from a purely olfactory point of view: they have been for centuries. But of course, they are also deeply symbolic, and thus tug at memories older than the beholder’s. Here, rose and jasmine are both seductive and mystical. The herbs that tinge them with green and aromatic notes hint at an even richer bouquet – there is a tuberose effect – the petals vivid against sap-filled leaves and sprigs. Myrrh is not only a symbol of the oriental resins imported through Venice, but the substance of tears. The gift of Mary Magdalene, the myrrh-bearer, the Weeper.

So do perfumes expire ;
So sigh tormented sweets, oppress'd
 With proud unpitying fires ;
Such tears the suff'ring rose that's vex'd
With ungentle flames does shed,
Sweating in a too warm bed.

Richard Crashaw, “Saint Mary Magdalene, or The Weeper” (1652)

It may be a stretch to link a mystical Baroque English poet to a French Sufi perfumer based in Italy, but then when you follow Corto Maltese into a secret Venetian garden you’re apt to end up anywhere[1]. Elsewhere in the poem, Crashaw speaks of “the balsam-sweating bough” and its “med’cinable teares” – myrrh --, and of “the gentle stream/ Where th'milky rivers creep”.

So: rose, myrrh, milk. And there we join AbdesSalaam again, since the secret ingredient of his Venezia Giardini Segreti is ambergris, which he describes as “a scent of leather, of sea and of mother’s milk.” I’ve only smelled ambergris tincture twice, and couldn’t truly pretend to recognize it: perhaps the “sea” and “mother’s milk” are what give Venezia Giardini Segreti the eerie, “I’ve been there before” sensation I experienced when I applied it. Like Venice, perfume is nothing if not a labyrinth.

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[1] For instance, in the sole church dedicated to the Maddalena in Venice: on its façade, a Masonic symbol: the all-seeing eye of God (or Wisdom). Corto’s adventures in Venice begin with his falling into a Masonic temple through a glass roof.