Kerry is a big fan!

Living in a house with three dogs pretty much guar­an­tees that our linoleum kitchen floor and hard­wood din­ing and liv­ing room often have the look of a Frat house. Once a week I mop the whole area, and am always on the look­out for one prod­uct that will make the job eas­ier or at least less tedious. I decided to try “Spuma di Sciampagna’s PAVIMENTI” and give Mr. Clean a break. Intrigued by the bot­tle design and the claim that it can “degrease and wash ceramic and mar­ble floors, stairs, bath­room fix­tures and wall tiles” I fig­ured that it must be the per­fect all pur­pose house­hold cleanser. I bought a bot­tle and tried it out on the floors, and an intim­i­dat­ing old fan that I recently dragged out of the cel­lar dur­ing our last heat wave.

The cit­ronella scent is a nice break from the indus­trial and chem­i­cal wal­lop usu­ally asso­ci­ated with floor cleansers, and doesn’t leave your house smelling for days on end like a hos­pi­tal. Diluted with water, it did the trick on the fan in no time what­so­ever. I checked out the web­site (italsilva.com) and read a lit­tle about the his­tory of the com­pany while my lap­top gur­gled out Goldberg’s vari­a­tions. I always like to sup­port “the lit­tle guy”, and the fact that this com­pany is 100 years old and employs only 250 peo­ple added to its lus­ter. See you later Baldy.

Below is some inter­est­ing his­tory I gleaned from the website.

Established in 1908, the Saponeria Silva com­pany took great care in its pro­duc­tion of bath and laun­dry soaps, pro­vid­ing qual­ity prod­ucts guar­an­teed by a wealth of expe­ri­ence. Having aban­doned its old soap cut­ters, wood kilns for dry­ing and ancient pro­duc­tion meth­ods, the Italsilva Group has main­tained the tra­di­tional fra­grances and prop­er­ties of its deter­gent prod­ucts, while com­ply­ing to the most mod­ern tech­nol­ogy processes, ensur­ing both qual­ity and efficiency.

A spe­cial for­mu­la­tion makes it ideal for all house­hold clean­ing duties; degreas­ing, wash­ing and hygi­en­iz­ing, while leav­ing a fresh clean fra­grance on ceramic and mar­ble floors, stairs, bath­room fix­tures, tiles… even rec­om­mended on glass and mir­rors. Spuma di Sciampagna Marsiglia hygienic floor cleaner leaves a clas­sic fresh clean fra­grance of essen­tial cit­ronella oil.

In 1997, Italsilva enacted its great rev­o­lu­tion of trans­form­ing a clas­sic prod­uct, solid Marseille soap (the tra­di­tional soap “bar”), into a liq­uid, easy dosage and sim­ple to use prod­uct that pre­serves the same char­ac­ter­is­tics as the “orig­i­nal” prod­uct: its excep­tional clean­ing and hygi­en­iz­ing power also has a del­i­cate touch on fine treated fab­rics (for laun­dry deter­gents) and skin (for beauty care prod­ucts). Marseille soap is hypo-allergenic and presents a bal­anced phys­i­o­log­i­cal pH level.

The his­tory of Marseille soap dates back to the 9th cen­tury. Tradition in the region of Liguria has it that in the city of Savona a fisherman’s wife first came across this soap in an absolutely acci­den­tal, “house­hold” man­ner by boil­ing soda lye in a pot con­tain­ing olive oil. Since then, this laun­dry soap has been pro­duced with pri­mary mate­ri­als deriv­ing from nat­ural veg­etable fats from olives, nat­ural soda and essen­tial cit­ronella oil, which lends Marseille soap its typ­i­cal and unmis­tak­ably char­ac­ter­is­tic fra­grance. The devel­op­ment of the soap indus­try along the coastal cities of the Mediterranean (Savona, Genoa and Venice) was favored by the pres­ence of olive oil and nat­ural soda obtained from the ashes of sea plants. The first soap fac­to­ries were there­fore estab­lished in Liguria, specif­i­cally at Savona, where soap-making became a flour­ish­ing busi­ness already in the 15th cen­tury.
During the 1600s, due to a stop­page in indus­trial activ­ity through­out the Italian penin­sula as a result of fre­quent inva­sions, supremacy in the soap trade was passed on to the French: Colbert, a min­is­ter under Louis XIV (the Sun King), called in mas­ter Ligurian soap-makers and built soap fac­to­ries in Toulouse and Marseille. The area around Marseille, in par­tic­u­lar, dis­tin­guished itself imme­di­ately for the high qual­ity of the pri­mary mate­ri­als used in its soap fac­to­ries. All of which explains the close bond which still today links this soap to Marseille — even though the ori­gins of this noble and ancient prod­uct derived from nat­ural ingre­di­ents are dis­tinctly closer to Italy… we need only point to the lin­guis­tic sim­i­lar­ity between “Savona” and “savon”, the French word for soap.

The over­all ver­sa­til­ity of Marseille soap allowed its use to be imme­di­ately and widely dis­sem­i­nated: its suc­cess was there­fore ordained. The his­tory of Marseille soap goes back hun­dreds of years, and the man­u­fac­tur­ing norms and guide­lines of this irre­place­able prod­uct were estab­lished by an edict issued by the Sun King him­self. The pro­duc­tion tech­niques and nat­ural ingre­di­ents employed in the mak­ing of this prod­uct are steeped in tra­di­tion, yet ren­der it mod­ern and capa­ble of sat­is­fy­ing even the most demand­ing con­sumers.