Long before the modern deluge of organic soaps, herbal remedies, juice cleanses, and lifestyle brands like Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP, the mindful crowd had a medieval-era source for all-natural panaceas: the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella. Roughly translated as the “Perfume-Pharmaceutical Workshop of New Saint Mary’s Church,” this world-renowned cosmetics and pharmaceutical company began its illustrious life as a community health clinic at a 13th-century Florentine monastery. Whether you were European royalty desperately seeking a cure for impotence or a working-class neighbor looking for the latest deodorant, Santa Maria Novella was the place to go.
“In the monks’ book of recipes, one of the best recipes was to go and live on the hills.”
Established in 1221 on the outskirts of Florence, Italy, the Santa Maria Novella monastery was originally built alongside a small 9th-century church known as Santa Maria delle Vigne, or Saint Mary of the Vineyards, whose name evoked the site’s farmland setting just outside the city’s medieval walls. To soothe sickly parishioners in their quarter of Florence, an inventive group of friars began developing recipes for plant-based salves, tinctures, and perfumes designed to combat various ailments, from pregnancy to the plague. The friars’ earliest concoctions relied heavily on alchemy, a blending of scientific techniques with mystic and spiritual traditions.
When the church was replaced by a much larger basilica, which was completed in the 14th century, it was renamed Santa Maria Novella (“novella” meaning “new” in Italian). But even as the city expanded beyond its walls, the friars remained focused on the natural world, cultivating native and exotic plants to use in their experimental medicines. Aside from a few short closures during the world wars, the business has operated continuously since its founding, supplying loyal customers with herbal remedies and natural cosmetics for more than 600 years.
Gianluca Foà, the modern company’s Chief Commercial Officer, explains that two pivotal events changed the destiny of Santa Maria Novella’s little pharmacy. “First, in 1348, as soon as the plague epidemic came to Florence, the monks started trying to make something to fight this disease by turning to nature,” Foà says. Despite various attempts to combat the illness, more than half of Florence’s population was killed by the Black Death within a few years of the initial outbreak.
In 1353, as the city was reeling in the wake of this tragedy, Giovanni Boccacio wrote his famous book The Decameron, a collection of stories narrated by a group of young Italians sequestered from the sinister plague in a hillside villa outside of Florence. Isolation was the only reliable method for avoiding the Black Death, explains Diana Stefani, one of the current co-owners of the Santa Maria Novella cosmetics company. “In the monks’ book of recipes, one of the best recipes was to go and live on the hills,” Stefani says. “They also gave advice on changing the air in the rooms and carrying objects soaked with strong perfume,” the idea being that if you didn’t smell the plague, you wouldn’t get sick.
Much more:
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/medieval-monks-couldnt-cure-the-plague/
