Collection: Santa Maria Novella

{"type":"root","children":[{"type":"paragraph","children":[{"type":"text","value":"In 1221, Dominican monks established their convent in Florence on land outside the city walls, beginning to cultivate medicinal and aromatic plants in a botanical garden primarily intended to care for sick friars and passing pilgrims. This foundational act, of utter simplicity and humility, gave rise to what would eight centuries later become the world's oldest continuously operating pharmacy. Its uninterrupted continuity through wars, epidemics, political revolutions, and the most radical economic transformations in Western history constitutes an extraordinary historical fact in itself, offering a legitimacy that no marketing communication could ever artificially construct.\n\nThe Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella has traversed centuries, maintaining a relationship with botanical raw materials and artisanal formulation that has not fundamentally changed since the first herbals of the Dominican monks. The Acqua della Regina, a cologne created in the sixteenth century for Catherine de' Medici before her departure for France, where she would become queen, and whose original formula is preserved in the house's archives, is the most eloquent symbol of this continuity: a fragrance that has endured five hundred years of European history without fundamental alteration, worn by queens and aristocrats before being discovered by travelers and connoisseurs of historical perfumery worldwide. The creamy milk soaps formulated according to monastic recipes, botanical treatments whose efficacy rests on centuries of empirical observation and knowledge transmission, and the famous Pot Pourri, composed of herbs and flowers from the Tuscan hills fermented in terracotta jars using a jealously guarded secret process, together form a catalog that is literally a journey through time – that of a house which never needed to invent its heritage, for it has lived it.\n\nAt Actuel B, we offer a curated selection of Santa Maria Novella products, available in our boutiques in Avignon and Arles, as well as on our website. Perfumes, colognes, soaps, skincare, and Pot Pourri are presented by teams trained in the house's history and botanical universe, with the personalized advice that characterizes our approach to multi-brand luxury."}]}]}

• Santa Maria Novella

• Beauty Products
• Candles
• Perfumes