Often have I idly wondered: what, exactly, did an 18th century German smell like? I can hazard a guess: a combination of Liverwurst, Lebkuchen, Lederhosen and elaborately-greased whiskers. For some reason, the Italian Giovanni Maria Farina found himself in the German city of Köln in 1709, and apparently found the odour of the inhabitants so noxious that he had to invent Eau de Cologne to cover it up. The resulting light citrussy-herbal concoction turned out to be one of the most influential scents in the whole history of perfume.
Farina's Eau de Cologne was not original. Hungarians had hogged the market in the Middle Ages with their Eau d'Hongrie, a similar herbal fragrance with citric elements. Most Italian states had a profumeria churning out bottles of the same sort of thing, notably the Farmacia di Santa Maria Novella in Florence, which is still going strong today. Farina's genius, then, was principally in bringing sensory civilisation to soothe the savage Hun, and in turning the unlikely town of Köln into a world-famous producer of nice smells.
Farina's invention was widely imitated, but not perfected for more than two centuries. In the middle of the First World War, an unknown group of Parmense noses created the fragrance that would henceforth define the highpoint of Eaux de Cologne. With excellent chutzpah, they renamed it: Acqua di Parma. Both the Germans and the French could consider themselves to have been flicked the Vs.
Many great colognes are still available - among them, the S. Maria Novella one, and the authentic Kölnischwasser 4711. But Acqua di Parma bests the lot of them. Something about its minutely perfected combination of notes is more cosmopolitan and more seductive than anything comparable. And, crucially, it lasts much longer. A burst of fresh lemon to start is followed by a clever blend which manages to capture a sexy, laid-back, interwar complexity. The fresh middle notes of rose, lavender, rosemary and verbena don't dip too far into femininity to put off the men. And the woody base notes of vetiver, cedar and sandalwood don't veer too far into masculinity to put off the women.
Lots of the most sexy and stylish people of the twentieth century noticed how very, very good this was. Among the wearers of Acqua di Parma were Cary Grant and David Niven, Ava Gardner and Lana Turner; also Audrey Hepburn, but I don't like her so we'll draw a veil over that. The specific genius of AdP resides in the fact that it is equally sexy on a man or a woman (and, no doubt, on an intersexual). It makes everyone who wears it seem more sophisticated, richer, better-read, more widely travelled and better in bed.
I buy a bottle of this stuff every summer, and every time I spray it on I feel like I'm in a fast car being driven by a tall, dark, chiselled-featured young novelist around the Mediterreanean in the 1930s, on our way to get married in Monte Carlo just before he goes off to volunteer for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, in which he will have a hero's death when he leads Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and a group of wild-eyed socialist peasants to stop a Nazi division from burning down an orphanage by wrestling them to the ground with his bare hands... mmm... yeah.
Be wary of the perils on your journey. The shop assistant will probably try to persuade you to buy one of AdP's alternative smells: the dodgy Lavanda, the nose-itching Iris Nobile, or one of the horrific Blu Mediterraneo collection, all of which smell like over-iced cake that has been left out in the Tuscan sun for too long. Don't be diverted. You can have the Colonia Assoluta if you really must, but you will regret any attempt to improve on the original. Because it has now been three hundred years since Farina's marketing coup, and nobody's done it better. Acqua di Parma is perfect.
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