THE SAGA OF THE QUINTESSENCE by Slobodan Prosperov Novak

The saga of Palmižana, the Meneghello family and their court at Palmižana could well be broached with a forgotten but very aromatic little episode from the time of the Napoleonic wars when in 1807 the army physician Pierre Jerome Gaugiran, exhausted by his many battles, came to the town of Hvar. A year or two later, Napoleon was beaten, his army left the politically swollen Adriatic, and Hvar, on which Gaugiran had come to feel at ease, was taken over by the Habsburgs.  The Frenchman made a firm resolve to stay on the island, got married, started a family and obtained a license to set up an apothecary’s shop. Read more

Gian Battista Meneghello’s admission into this secret and mysterious world of plants and pharmacy was crucially to colour the further activities of his family and the love of the man for the apothecary’s trade and for plants was to strengthen the bond of destiny between the Meneghello and Palmižana.

The Meneghello bought the estate of the island in the nineteenth century and it became for them a parallel family quintessence. One quintessence was produced from rosemary and packed in little bottles and the other was produced from the dreams that took up their abode on the locality of Palmižana in the Pakleni Islands.