Eau d'Italie

I am still in the newbie stage of perfume addiction, where I want to smell everything, and I keep reading all the blogs, and getting excited about each new brand and scent I hear about. I want to smell everything. It was while I was trawling around for rose perfumes--I love rose scents, and haven't actually found The One I want yet, that I learned about Eau d'Italie, from someone who was reviewing their Paestum Rose perfume.

Apparently, Eau d'Italie is the brainchild of a woman who is part of the family that runs the world-famous (although I'd never heard of it before) Le Sirenuse Hotel in Positano, Italy. Eau d'Italie (and why does it have a French name, pray tell?) is a series of perfumes meant to evoke various parts of Italy. I was sold. For one thing, the whole set-up seemed like the setting for a Judith Krantz novel, and for another, I could hardly think of anything cooler than smelling like Italy. (There IS nothing cooler than smelling like Italy. Really.)

So I ordered me some decants.

The concept behind the first fragrance, Eau d'Italie seems to have been to capture the scent of the Amalfi coast in summertime. I have never been to Amalfi (alas, alas), but the Mediterranean summertime smell of this fragrance was incredibly familiar and resonant for this Northern California girl. "Angel Island!" I said after wearing it for a while. "Marin!"

It's the smell of clay and soil baking out in the summer heat, just a note of citrus from someone's backyard, a million herbs and flowers, dust kicking up under your hiking boots, and a chorus of insects screaming in the hills as the Pacific rolls silver-bright downhill from you. Well, it is for me, anyway.

I guess this makes sense. I live in a region with a Mediterreanean climate, and I suppose it is natural that some of the natural scents and aesthetics should overlap. The note that seems to make this perfume stand out for me is the red-clay smell that I get most strongly from it. Per fragrantica.com, "The accord of soil or the mineral accord of clay (argile in French) is the central note of the composition." It reminds me most of the summer smell of the hills around here, and I got another strong whiff just yesterday when I accompanied students from the school I teach at to a park with a baseball diamond. The red clay smell hit me in the face, and I said "Eau d'Italie!" And grinned.

I also got a little decant of Sienne l'Hiver. This did not require any time to get to know it and think about it. I had a visceral reaction to Sienne l'Hiver. Synapses went off. Pleasure centers in the brain lit up like fireworks. And I had to crack down on my first instinct, which was to drink it. Swear to Bob, as my students say, I almost poured out the decant straight onto my tongue.

Having avoided this, (what happens if you drink perfume, anyway? I grew up on stories of drunks in the U.S.S.R. drinking cologne for the alcohol content--but I made myself fairly queasy accidentally swallowing a slug of mouthwash a while ago) I am still experimentally taking the top off the Sienne l'Hiver every couple of days and sniffing it, just to get that "Uh huuuuh!" reaction from my brain again. It's so totally a fall/winter smell that I haven't been wearing it, although I sometimes dab my wrist so I can sniff while I watch TV or grade papers.

I get a lot of roasted chestnut from it, and smoke and incense. Apparently there is a black olive note--perhaps that's the slightly salty-rich smell that seems to underly the whole thing. I think the concept is to evoke a winter day in Siena--the chestnut vendors and the historical churches and such. For sure it's less familiar a smell to me than the Eau d'Italie is, but it evokes a wonderful sense of comfort and wonder combined--and I have a dreadful feeling that I will buy a whole bottle. I can hardly wait for November, just so I can wear this in cold, bleak weather. Mmmm. Good.

Now, the scent that actually brought me to this line, you may recall, was the Paestum Rose. To which my reaction was, in the words of Bart and Lisa Simpson, 'meh'. It's nice, but I basically smell heavy sweet roses and incense. I have no problem with either smell, but I am willing to bet I could find a body oil that smells exactly like this in a store on Telegraph Avenue or the Haight for seven bucks. It seems pretty strong for anything except a rave, (which I so rarely attend ;). There's something old-fashioned about it to me--it either evokes hippies (one of my students, who love Led Zeppelin could wear this), or very old-fashioned indeed--it seems Roman, possibly. Something ancient, and interesting, but not something I could wear any more than I could wear Liz Taylor's eye makeup from Cleopatra. (I bet Cleopatra would have gone for this fragrance, though. It is pretty sexy.)

I totally want to try the Magnolia Romana and Bois d'Ombrie scents.

The packaging, as you can see, is pretty awful. WHY have a line evoking all the regions of Italy and then package them in generic hairspray bottles? Oh well. When I have my own hotel in Italy I can put the signature perfume in anything I want, I guess.