What perfume to buy in Florence

Aquaflor was started by an Italian family in a single room of Palazzo Corsini Antinori Serristori, near Piazza Santa Croce. As it grew, the perfumes moved into a laboratory in the palace's old cellars, where they are still made. The shop is lined with dark wood shelves of essences, and you can have a scent made to measure.

This Florentine house began as an apothecary shop on Via dei Servi in 1561 and became a pharmacy in 1876. Its 17th century furniture is still in the historic shop. Today it runs its own fragrance laboratory in Florence and makes perfumes, home scents and skincare.

Florentine perfumer Lorenzo Villoresi started his perfume house in 1990 in an old palace on Via de' Bardi, close to the Ponte Vecchio. In 2006 he won the Prix Francois Coty in Paris. In 2019 he opened the Villoresi Museum in the same palace, with a library of scents and a garden of aromatic plants on a terrace over the Arno.

Profumoir is a perfume atelier in the San Niccolo area of Florence, founded by Daniele Cavalli and master perfumer Sileno Cheloni. It has a library of single scent notes, a lab for made-to-measure perfume and an aromatic garden. Its own lines include the seven-scent O.R.I.G.I.N.E. collection and Cheloni's Venenum collection.

Pharmacist and botanist Dr Giovanni Di Massimo started this house, and it is now run by the second generation of his family. It makes perfumes, cosmetics and herbal products inspired by Florence's Renaissance spice-shop tradition. The shop sits on Via Vacchereccia, a few steps from Palazzo Vecchio.