Potentially the Greatest Museum Exhibit of All Time

Now this is my kind of history:

What did Paris smell like in the mid-18th century? Try skunked red wine, wet cats, and gingivitis-tinged sputum, all bubbling in an open sewer on a record-setting summer’s day.

I can say this with some authority as I recently jammed my schnoz into “Paris 1738,” a scent that recreates the fetid odors of the olden city. France’s Christophe Laudamiel made the unusual odor as a tribute to the novel Perfume, whose murderous antihero was born in a fish market amid the stench of overflowing gutters and unwashed bodies. Now, thanks to a nose-tingling exhibit in downtown San Francisco, anybody can smell how the City of Love may have once reeked – and thank their lucky nostrils they live in an era with hot showers and shampoo.

“Urban Olfactory,” which runs until March 31 at SPUR, is a history lesson made entirely of smells: pine and cedar pulled from the imagined court of Louis XIV, spice-laden air over the Strait of Bosphorus in the Middle Ages, river water and hashish of modern-day Rotterdam. Those are the ones people might actually, you know, wear. There’s also the New Jersey Turnpike during a rainstorm, air pollution in San Francisco, and fresh manure in the French countryside. All these perfumes are presented in a line of lidded vitrines; visitors take a whiff of one, then go breathe into a glass of coffee beans to clear the nose.

Forget all the stupid presidents, high end fashions, deadly battles, or whatever people like in history. This my friends, is about as close to immersing yourself into the reality of the past as I’ve ever heard. I feel like traveling to San Francisco just to see it.

…I would fly out there if one of the exhibits includes the stench of rotting horses from the grotesque amount of horse deaths in 19th century American streets.