Aromata is an international contest and exhibition event dedicated to artistic perfumery. The focus is precisely on the artistic adjective. We have envisioned an event dedicated to master perfumers that could complement the other important national events in the industry which have a more trade fair aspect. We want it to become a complementary and synergistic event where the artistic creativity and sensitivity of perfumers is highlighted and appreciated on a par with that of a great painter or a famous composer.
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The event was conceived to accompany other national events in the sector with a predominantly trade fair focus. In fact, Aromata intends to represent a complementary and synergistic event where the artistic creativity and sensitivity of master perfumers are highlighted and appreciated on a par with those of a famous composer or a great painter.
Niche perfumery, born 50 years ago, is now considered the spearhead of the industry and has opened up new spaces for the possibilities of composing fragrances.
The venue for the first edition of the Aromata Prize, which took place from 16 to 18 May, was the frescoed rooms of Palazzo Cavallerini Lazzaroni, a splendid baroque building a stone's throw from Largo di Torre Argentina, now home to the Spazio Sette bookshop.
With the term Aromata, the Romans indicated the spices whose aromas were used to make perfumed ointments such as Regale unguentum composed of a long list of ingredients including cinnamon, cardamom, saffron and myrrh. At the time, perfumers were gathered in the Collegium aromatarium corporation and their shops were grouped near the Velabro, in particular in the Vicus thuriarus and the Vicus unguentarius.
It is therefore no coincidence that Rome immediately seemed to us to be the ideal place to host the event which, conceived as a container, will see the creation of multiple events over the course of future editions.
The Premio Aromata 2024 – “Perfume: expressive code” is a contest inspired by the Call for Art in which artists are invited to create a themed work. In this case the master perfumers - protagonists of what can undoubtedly be considered a centuries-old art - were called to create their creation. The chosen theme is "The invisible between the lines": a journey dedicated to the link between writing and perfume, between scripta manent and the narrative power, albeit evanescent, of a fragrance.
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There are many books in the world of literary production whose plots revolve around perfumes. Authors of all times and places such as Pliny the Elder who dedicated to Vespasian an extensive scientific dissertation on the production and social destination of oriental perfumes or Muhammad An-Nafzawi with The Perfumed Garden, a manual of erotic literature from the 15th century. “Perfumes become words, they enter the expressive arsenal of many writers: where language is not enough to express eros or yearning, a fragrance makes up for it” (Giovanna Zucconi – La sua voce è profumo) Even further to the East here is the story of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, an 11th century Japanese poet who highlights the great value attributed to perfume by Japanese culture in the Heian era. Returning to Europe, one can think of the evocation of perfumed smoke that persists in the sixteenth-century religious poetry of Jean de La Ceppède up to the Sicilian nineteenth century with Profumo, a realist novel by Luigi Capuana.
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The sources of inspiration can therefore be the most disparate. Not only perfume in literature, but also the reverse process: literature becoming fragrance. We are interested in the possibility for the invisible - told or imagined - that dwells between the lines of a literary passage, to come to life thanks to the creativity of the maitre parfumeur.
Participants are invited to present a fragrance inspired by the perfumes described in the chosen literary text or by the charm of a character, by the atmosphere of a setting, by a poem, by the mark left on the heart and by the intimate change that reading those lines has made it possible. Their literary choices will constitute the stages of a sensorial experience: an olfactory journey, a tour of the world, a journey through time.
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