Richard Axel and Linda Buck, Nobel prize 2004 for their studies on smell stimuli, describe this sense as “a marvelous and non-ending enigma”. For most of the people the sense of smell is not well known or it is seen as a suggestive trace of our evolution. But for scientists it is the most elusive and mysterious one. We are able to scientifically describe a smell perception but it is very difficult to tell about a lived olfactory experience. Emotion and memory are the cerebral center involved in the olfactory analysis, there are instead less connections to the language center. So let’s try to describe a smell and see how hard it is!

On Smell-it more than 100 smells create an itinerary to be followed by nose, from the physiology of our olfaction system to the chemistry of smell and from smells of trees and animals to perfumes. In this exhibition it is possible to smell and to play with the most disgusting odors, maybe appreciating once their utility or to find the uniqueness of our body smells. It is also possible to rediscover old emotions smelling the perfumes of some flowers, to understand something more about vines and many other interesting things. The exhibition is a travel to the discovery of ourselves.