“Sweet, smooth and mauve color” (Marcel Proust)

These are the words of the French poet about an imaginary Parma, never having visited it, which clearly evokes the olfactory and emotional sensations that the city and its symbolic flower evokes. Among the countless varieties of violets and violets, that of Parma is distinguished by being the most fragrant, with its particular essence strong and enveloping. A flower that received the favours of Archduchess Maria Luigia of Austria, as well as the Duchess of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, so much so that “this flower identifies the Duchess, as the city itself identifies”, as Francesca Sandrini, director of the Glauco Lombardi Museum, suggests, where all the relics of Maria Luigia are kept.

Sovereign of the Duchy of Parma between 1816 and 1847, Maria Luigia personally dedicated herself to the cultivation of the plant, first in the Botanical Garden that she herself wanted, and then in the garden of the summer residence of Colorno, the palace where she first went to live and then in the greenhouses preserved in the Ducal Park, not far from the Ducal Palace of Parma where she moved later, and whose rooms were decorated with the beloved flower after being impregnated with its scent.

It is in the Convent of the Annunciata that, at the request of the Archduchess, and a long and patient work, that the monks to whom it had been commissioned, manage to obtain from the violet and its leaves, an essence completely equal to the flower.

In 1870, Ludovico Borsari inherited the secret formula from the skilful alchemical art of the monks, which is still jealously guarded, from which the idea of producing and proposing perfume to a vast public was born, thus giving life to the perfume that is now known throughout the world.

In the ancient headquarters opened in 1934, today you can visit “Primo Museo Italiano della Profumeria” and you can rediscover the history of this fragrance that over time has taken on the meaning of purity and humility.

The flower was so dear to Marie Louise as to the Parmesans, who still go on pilgrimage to her tomb in the Capuchin Crypt in Vienna, to lay a bunch of them for free.

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