The Princess and the Bitter Orange Tree

Neroli comes from the blossoms of the bitter orange tree, not the fruit — a fine but crucial distinction, since the same tree yields two entirely separate scents besides: petitgrain from leaves and twigs, bitter orange oil from the peel. The blossom oil itself is green, faintly bitter, with a metallic sharpness at the top that only opens, after a few minutes, into something honeyed and almost skin-warm. Anyone who knows only the sweet, round orange-blossom water from the kitchen is usually startled by pure neroli.

The scent, admittedly, was not entirely new at the princess’s time: orange-blossom water, aqua nanfa, had already been known centuries earlier in Arab-influenced Sicily and in al-Andalus, used in both cooking and cosmetics. What changed with Anne Marie Orsini was not the discovery of the scent, but its social status: thanks to her, a regionally common water became a status symbol of the European courts.

The oil owes its name not to botany but to a woman. Anne Marie Orsini, Duchess of Bracciano and Princess of Nerola — a small town northeast of Rome — made bitter orange oil fashionable at her court toward the end of the seventeenth century: she used it to perfume her gloves and her bathwater, and within a short time the European courts no longer spoke of bitter orange oil at all, only of acqua di Nerola. A princely title turned into a generic name that no perfumer’s training omits to this day.

The eighteenth century took up the fashion gladly: neroli became one of the load-bearing components of early eau de cologne, that cool citrus-herbal composition that conquered half the world from Cologne outward. Today neroli sits, in perfumery, most often at the heart of a composition, between the fleeting top notes and the heavier base — an oil that can conjure a seventeenth-century ballroom just as easily as, quite unpretentiously, an orange grove in spring. It was not entirely a coincidence that Incense of Music 22, in December 2017, put exactly this pairing on the program: petitgrain and neroli, two faces of the same tree, burned side by side on a single evening.