LIFE: Sweet Smelling Grasse

GRASSE, France   If you leave the Mediterranean Sea behind you at Cannes and head north toward the Maritime Alps, the road winds upward passing lush vineyards and fields of lavender. There are castles and monasteries hiding in the verdant hills, and knock you to your knees panoramas appear around every bend in the road.

 

Grasse, France

It isn’t long before you arrive in Grasse, a city that clings like a lover’s fragrance to the steep hills high above the French Riviera. It’s a city of flowers and perfume, a city you won’t soon forget.  

The narrow cobblestone streets wind past well kept 17^th and 18^th century buildings, sometimes going through handcrafted stone tunnels that open onto large treed squares. The slight patina that covers the buildings is from the centuries of fragrance-laden clouds that once floated in from the flower fields.

 Lavender Fields Near Grasse

Today large pots of fragrant blooming plants and colorful flowers hang from every lamppost. Blood red geraniums, pink carnations and white Sweet William cascade from ancient wrought iron balconies. The air smells sweet in Grasse, as well it should, for Grasse is the birthplace of the perfume industry.

The Boulevard du Jeu de Ballon, is one of the town’s main thoroughfares. This is where you’ll find shops selling tasseled and beribboned flacons of delicious smelling perfumes as well as cologne, sprays, fragrant soaps, lotions, candles and essential oils. Perfume and scents have been a part of life in this small town since before the French Revolution. But it wasn’t always that way.

 A Pleasant Stroll 

In the 1500s Italian leather artisans from the nearby Italian Riviera immigrated to Grasse and set up workshops. The town quickly became the center of a small tanning industry. The Italians produced gloves and other small leather products; often perfuming them with the flowers they found growing steps from their door.

Perfumes had long been popular in Italy, so much so that when 14 year old Catherine de' Medici of Florence, married the soon to be King of France, Henry II and moved to Paris in 1533, she brought her private perfumer with her. To prevent his much coveted formulas from being stolen, she kept him, and his formulas, locked away in a hidden laboratory. The only way in or out was through a secret passageway, which was connected to her apartment. 

 Place aux Aires 

As Queen of France, when Catherine started wearing perfumed gloves, they became very fashionable. But fashion aside, anyone who could afford them wanted perfumed gloves, or at the least a scented handkerchief to hold up to their nose, for in the mid 1500’s the cities of Europe were not as we see them today. Even two hundred years after Catherine’s death, the situation hadn’t changed much.

In his book Perfume, author Patrick Suskind describes the cities of France during the eighteenth century like this:  "there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us. . . the streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat. There was the stench of sulfur, the stench of caustic lyes and the stench of congealed blood from the slaughterhouses. People stank of rotting teeth, sweat and unwashed clothes . .

 

A Lovely Place to Relax

It was during this period that Suskind describes that Grasse prospered. The town became the largest production center for raw materials, specializing in jasmine and rose petals. Paris became the commercial counterpart to Grasse and the world center of perfume. Perfume houses such as Houbigant (which still produces Quelques Fleurs), Lubin, RogeR & Gallet, and Guerlain, which were in Paris, based their industries on the flowers they bought from Grasse. 

In those days, an early morning walk around town would bring you face to face with mountains of freshly picked rose petals, vats of mimosa or baskets of violets and orange blossoms, harvested in the cool hours just before dawn when the oil in the flowers is the most concentrated.

 Grasse Flower Market

But there are few mountains of flowers waiting to be processed these days, and no one talks about the price of jasmine or rose petals anymore. Today it’s the price of guaiacolo, ionone, chinolina, and the other chemicals used in the production of perfume that is discussed over lunch.

Changing tastes and the development of modern chemistry laid the foundations for perfumery as we know it today. Alchemy gave way to chemistry and new fragrances were created.

 The One and Only Chanel 5

Today both old and new perfume making techniques are followed in Grasse. This is where Chanel No. 5 was created, and is still produced, as are many other perfumes and scents for top Parisian couturier houses like Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent. The scents are produced in small, private laboratories scattered throughout the town in low concrete buildings   hidden away behind tall fences and large trees.

Their perfume secrets are jealously guarded, much like a king’s ransom. The unfamiliar company names on the brass nameplates above the doorbells belie the contribution they make to the thirty-six billion dollar a year business called perfume.

 Fragonard Museum

Perfume is so seductive there was a time when young ladies were warned against smelling the scent of tuberose in the evening for fear it would make them overly susceptible to amorous advances. Even Father Lorenzo Quart, the hero in Arturo Perez-Reverte's novel The Seville Communion, falls under its spell.

"Macarena," he said softly, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. As he did so, he smelled her perfume: gentle, like jasmine." 

 

 Fragonard Perfume Museum

You can see how scents are created by visiting one of the town’s three large perfume houses: Fragonard, Galimard or Molinard. I chose to visit Galimard simply because it is the oldest. The original Monsieur Galimard supplied pomades and perfumes to the Perfume Court of Louis XV, and the company has been making perfume and scents ever since.  

At the Galimard factory I met Monsieur Jacques Maurel, the Galimard “Nose” or Master Parfumeur. Monsieur Maurel is one of fifty Noses in the world certified to make perfume. Noses, or ‘le nez’ as they are known in French, work at a desk called a perfume organ because of its similarities to a musical organ. But instead of musical pipes, perfumers are surrounded by hundreds of dark brown bottles filled with scents. As part of their training, Noses must be able to recognize and identify two to four thousand odors, and be familiar with the classical Renaissance techniques of perfume making.

 

 M. Maurel, Madame Galiard

Just across the street from the Perfume Museum is the Fragonard museum, the family home of the artist Jean-Honore Fragonard, Grasse’s most famous artist. His large religious painting, Washing of the Feet, hangs in the 12^th century Cathedral of Grasse, Notre-Dame du Puy, in Place du Petit Puy. 

From the Cathedral it is just a short walk to Place aux Herbes, and from there to the town’s principal square Place aux Aires where you can relax and enjoy lunch under the shade of large chestnut trees. 

The daily flower mart arranged around the three tiered fountain in the center of the square is reminiscent of the by-gone days when local perfumers came here to buy wheelbarrows full of rose petals and jasmine to take back to their workshops and process into perfume.

Grasse is an easy day trip from Canne or Nice, and a pleasant place to spend an afternoon. And the best part is there are no long lists of must see sites to make you feel guilty about sitting around, sipping a cup of French roasted coffee, and watching as coiffured white poodles pull chic matrons around the square. Viva la France.

This article also appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Al Buraq Magazine

LIFE: Travels With Ginny - A True Tale About a Foot

CHIAVARI, Italy – Talked to my cousin Ginny the other day. We haven’t talked in a while and just hearing her voice made me realize how much I miss her. We’ve had some good times together, traveling around, getting into trouble, getting out of trouble and laughing all the way. What I’ve posted today is a true tale of just one adventure in my travels with Ginny.  I hope you enjoy it.

Place Rossetti, Nice France

 TRAVELS WITH GINNY - THE FOOT 

The date 16 August,1999 is burned on my brain. It is the day my cousin Ginny and I were crossing rue Hotel du Poste in Nice, France when I fell and twisted my ankle. As even in tragedies there are bits of fortune, mine is that we were not far from the Lady of the Rocks Hospital, which is where I ended up.   

            I had never been in an emergency room anywhere and so my experience with such things is limited to watching ER on television. Needless to say reality is quite different from the fictionalized version. No George Clooney for one. Yes there are doctors walking around, pouty French film types, but in my opinion the entire ER department needs to have its blood pressure checked. If things moved any slower we would have been at STOP. I want sirens to go off, or at the very least a few bells and whistles, some signal that emergencies are coming in and need to be treated, but the aura of calm is overwhelming.

Most of the emergencies appear to be motor scooter accidents. One young man they roll in is covered with twigs and branches, his face is scratched and bleeding and his jacket is a mess. He looks as if he has been launched head first into a very large bush. Then there were the old people who had apparently wandered away from where they were, forgot where they were going, and now can't remember where they came from. The woman on the gurney next to me is clutching three purses: a gold lamè evening bag, a large cloth bag with a zippered closing, and a beige pleather bag with a long strap. She also has a jacket with her even though it is in the mid 90’s and the humidity is high. She is obviously a woman who prepares for every occasion.

 They wheel me into a hallway and leave me there.  After a while, two hours to be exact, a doctor stopped by, wiggles my foot and sends me to x-ray. The bad news is that I have indeed broken a very, very small bone in my foot. A teeny tiny bone. A bone so insignificant there isn't even a name for it.

             Nonetheless I am whisked off to the cast department.

"Ooo la la, vat 'ave vee 'ere?" asks the round and jolly cast person. Put your foot up like dees, ho kay? First we put this beige sock with no toes, then this bright green bandage, ho kay?  Hold eet,” she says as she goes round and round with the bright green bandage, right up to my knee. 

“It’s too tight”, I wail.

“No, no, it's not too tight, it is just right."

As the green bandage hardens into stone, my toes begin to puff up like blue Christmas tree ornaments.

"Now, we wrap eet all up with this beige and blue stripe bandage, and voila! a little tape to finish the package and eet is done!"

            I hate it. It is hot. It is heavy. I feel as if a God in some far off place in the universe wants to know more about the migratory patterns of ex-pats in Italy and had me grabbed and tagged.  Get this thing off my leg.

            “We have to go home,” I say to Ginny.   

            The next day with the vile green cast on my leg and shiny new crutches tucked under my arm, we take a taxi to the Nice train station.

            "Go to the Tourist Information Desk and ask them were we can get a wheel chair,” I say to her. “There's no way I can hop up and down the stairs to the tracks on crutches." So she does.

           The Tourist Information people send her to the Accuiel (Welcome) desk. The Accuiel desk sends her to another Accuiel desk. The second Accuiel desk sends her to yet another Accuiel desk, and when she finds herself in front of the Accuiel desk she  started from she throws up her hands in true Italian fashion and says Basta. Enough.

In the meantime I am holding court with a family from Montana who had never been to Europe before and were wondering how come there are no bugs or flies here. Ginny finally comes back with a strapping young Frenchman and a wheelchair. Ahhhh. Success. Off we go, he pushing me in the wheelchair and poor cousin Ginny toting all the baggage like a foot weary train station bell cap in an old Hollywood movie.

"You go down the stairs," the Frenchman says to Ginny "and I'll meet you on the other side of the track and help you put the luggage on the train."

Ginny takes one look at the stairs, one look at the luggage, and opts to go with us thinking he must be heading for an elevator. But no, instead we head for the very end of the train platform where the Frenchman proceeds to push me across the tracks, clutching my crutches in my arms like a shield. Just the thing to fend off a high speed TVG train that I'm convinced is going to come whizzing around the corner at any second.

"Stop" I yell, "Help", as images flash through my mind of my much loved and carefully cared for body parts splattering from one end of the station to the other. Then I look over and see poor Ginny, loaded down like an Mongolian packer crossing the Himalayas following the best she can, bent over under the load of bags and suitcases that are swaying to and fro and I shut up.  

Finally settled on the train I ask the Italian conductor to arrange for a wheel chair when we get to Milan. "No problem," he says, "I'm getting off in Genoa so when the next conductor comes on, just remind him." 

When we arrive in Genoa and the new conductor comes on, I do just that.

"Signora, Signora, Signora," he clucks. "It is all taken care of." 

Fifteen minutes later he’s back. "My colleagues in Milan want to know your name."

"My name? Are they afraid they won't recognize the person with the bright green cast on her leg carrying crutches as the one who needs a wheel chair?"

"Don't ask," he says.

I give him my Italian Identity Card and he reads my name into his cell phone. “Thank goodness you have an Italian name,” he says, “if you were German or Swedish they would have hung up on me.”

Once home, I'm stir crazy before the door even closes. Ginny is leaving soon to go back to the States so she spends the next couple of days running back and forth to the grocery store stocking my cupboard with stuff like tuna fish, pasta, frozen veggies and water. 

"That's what Nonna did during the War,” I tell her. "Stock up on stuff”.

Banal conversation. What I really want to know is if the current lust of my life, the dairy department stocker at the GS grocery store, stares at her like he stares at me when I shop there.  I finally get up the nerve to ask.

"I don't think so," she says. "No one stared at me."

I’m not convinced.

On my own after Ginny leaves, I rent a wheel chair. The elevator in my apartment building is a tiny thing, so I have to shoehorn the wheel chair into it, then squeeze myself in as well. But that turns out to be the least of my problems. Once on the street I can't get the chair to go straight. It wants to veer to the right. And while my street has wheel chair access, they are used by motorists as access driveways to park on the sidewalk so they are crumbled and broken up. What that means is once I get the chair down into the street, I can't get back up to the sidewalk. It is a nightmare. 

 The cast is making me crazy. I hate it with all my heart. I am afraid to go to sleep at night for fear it is cutting off my circulation and a blood clot is forming and speeding straight for my brain and I am convinced I am going to wake up dead. I decide to call Francesco, an orthopedic surgeon I know, and ask if he would please come over and take a look at the x-rays and take the cast off, for surely it is not an absolute necessity.

He comes over that same night. The cast has to stay.

How long, I want to know.

Six weeks.

Six weeks! No relief from this hot itchy thing until October? It’s inhumane. It’s excessive cruelty. It’s against every international law on the books, it’s even against the Geneva Convention rules on torture I whine.

"Phyllis, Phyllis, Phyllis, you are the worst patient I have ever met," he says shaking his head as he walks out the door. 

In spite of the trials and tribulations of that long hot summer, I survived. Since then Ginny and I have gone on to many other adventures, like the time we almost got washed overboard on a boat trip to the Cinque Terre. But never mind, that's another story for another day. Besides, from the conversation we had yesterday, I have a feeling there are more adventures in our future, and I for one can't wait.

LIFE: On the Road to Paris

CHIAVARI – Italy - The decision to take the train to Paris was easy to make. I like traveling by train in Italy, and besides if I went from Chiavari to Nice, in the south of France, I could spend some time there and still be in Paris on Friday afternoon.  It sounded like a plan to me. The truth of the matter was that whichever way I went to Paris, which was my final destination, it was going to require spending a night in either Pisa, Milan or Nice and Nice  won. 

 Gare de Nice Ville - Train Station in Nice, France

I can’t count the number of times I have traveled to Nice by train. It was practically my home away from home back in the day when I was an illegal immigrant trying to stay one step ahead of the carabineri. Just to maintain a quasi legal status I had to periodically leave Italy and re-enter. With a new entry stamp in my passport, I was then legal to stay in Italy, but only for tourism. As a tourist I was not supposed to open a bank account or rent an apartment, and most of all I was not supposed to work. In reality I did all three.

Since I was living in the Genoa suburb of Nervi, France was the closest country I could get to.  So every three months I would pack my black leather traveling bag and take the train from Nervi to Nice. Two hours to the French Italian border, then ½ hour to Nice, passing the one and only ultra-glamorous James Bond, Princess Grace Monte Carlo, Monte Carlo along the way.

The Royal Castle in Monte Carlo

As time passed I started exploring some of the small towns near Nice like: Canne, of film festival fame; Saint Paul de Vence, an artist’s colony set in a small Medieval village in the Maritime Alps; and Grasse, where the French perfume industry got its start. But Nice was always my favorite destination so the idea of going back there, even for a short visit, was definitely appealing to me.

But now things are a little more complicated. Because of an on-going dispute between the French rail company and the Italian rail company, there are no direct trains to Nice any more. I was going to have to go from Chiavari to Genova, change trains and go the the French/Italian border town of Ventimiglia. From Ventimiglia I would have to change trains again for Nice. Not really a problem, just a pain in the butt. What I could do though, was buy a ticket from Chiavari to Nice. That was good. But not to Paris. For Paris I had to buy my train ticket in Nice.

 Nice is really Nice

And that was when I almost got arrested. I had just bought my ticket to Paris and was walking out of the Nice train station when I spotted the Accqueil/Information Desk. You see, I have an article that I occasionally re-sell about being in Nice, breaking my foot and having my leg encased in a cast at the Emergency Room of the Lady of the Rocks Hospital in downtown Nice.  http://thisitalianlife.blogspot.it/2012/12/life-travels-with-ginny.html  Because my leg was in a cast  my poor cousin Ginny began going round and round from one Accqueil/Information to another Accqueil/Information desk  trying to get a wheelchair for me as I certainly couldn’t carry bags and hop up and down stairs at the same time. It’s a nice article, I have sold it several times, but what I don’t have are photos of the Accqueil/Information desk at the Nice train station. So I took out my little camera and started snapping away.

It was then that I was accosted by the Accqueil/Information lady who growled at me and started making threatening moves toward my camera. She actually grabbed it out of my hands and started frantically pressing buttons in an attempt to delete the photos I had just taken. She was very upset, more upset than the situation actually called for, and when she couldn’t delete the photos she shoved the camera back into my hands saying something, in a threatening tone of voice that I understood to mean that I should delete the photos immediately. 

 The Casino in Nice, France

I have never deleted photos on my camera. I don’t know how to do it. I really don’t. As I tried to explain that to her, she was getting more and more frustrated and kept reaching over and trying to press more buttons. Her face was bright red and if she could have justified bopping me on the head I’m sure she would have. But in the crowded train station with hundreds of people as witness to my non-aggressive behavior it was not a good idea and I could see her re-thinking her options.

She thought my non-compliance was due to not understanding French, but I understood perfectly, I just couldn’t do what she wanted. She, the person in charge of information at the train station, was the one who didn’t understand. She finally called over one of the guards that guard the entrance to the train tracks, asking him if he spoke English and telling him about my egregious offense. The guard came over, he seemed calm and reasonable. I told him I didn’t know how to delete the photos and handed him the camera saying if you know how to do it, go ahead, be my guest. I’ve sold the article several times without a photo of the Accqueil desk, and I’m sure I can do it again.  

 Nice is a very glamorous city

He did manage to delete the photos and totally ignoring her he told me that photos of the Accqueil Desk are not allowed – even though there is no sign saying that – and that she could have called the police and had me arrested. Did I believe him? No. And even if she did call the police would they have come to arrest a tourist who doesn’t speak French for taking photos of the Welcome/Information Desk? Not likely.

If the unpleasant experience dampened my spirits they were quickly revived with a stroll through my favorite French department store, Galleries LaFayette. The next morning I was sitting in First Class on the TVG heading for a fun weekend in Paris, and that poor woman was back sitting in the Information booth welcoming visitors to Nice in her own inimitable way. 

  The object of my affection - Galleries LaFayette Dept. Store, Nice France

I still don’t know what the fuss was all about, but Nice is a major tourist destination on the French Riviera, a great place to visit and you would think they would hire someone for the Information desk of the train station who not only speaks English, but has a kinder, more gently approach to people visiting the city. What do you think?