According to a Capri legend, the island’s first perfume was a happy accident. In 1380, the prior of the Certosa di San Giacomo, a monastery on Capri, heard that Queen Joan I of Naples was about to visit. He gathered a large bouquet of the island’s most fragrant flowers to welcome her.
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Queen Joan ruled Naples in the 14th century, and the monastery had been built only a few years earlier on land she had given.
According to the legend, the queen never arrived because a storm at sea stopped her journey. The prior is said to have used flowers from about 80 different species, and they stayed in water for three days.
When he went to throw them away, he noticed that the water had a new scent. He asked a monk who studied alchemy, an early form of chemistry, and the monk traced it to a wild carnation from Capri. The scented water then became the island’s first perfume.
Away from the legend, a more concrete story is set in 1948. According to the perfume brand, the prior of the Certosa found old perfume formulas in the monastery’s archives. With the Pope’s permission, he passed them to a chemist from Piedmont, in northern Italy.
The chemist opened a small laboratory and named it Carthusia, from the Latin word for a charterhouse. Today the brand sells perfumes, soaps and creams inspired by the island’s flowers and plants.
The Certosa itself dates from the 14th century and is often described as the oldest monastery on Capri. It belonged to the Carthusians, an order of monks known for their quiet, private way of life. Centuries later, in the early 1900s, the path known as Via Krupp was built to link its area with the harbour at Marina Piccola.