The Scent
This perfume captures the scent of the hills above Florence - the vineyards, the wild grass, the finocchio, the hot dusty Florentine earth. And of course a torrent of Violets...
The Story
This perfume was inspired by a passage toward the end of Chapter Six in one of my favorite E M Forster novels. Here's a bit:
"She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; the terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.
Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone.
George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who has fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her."
I've long loved that passage in this novel as well as its counterpart in the Merchant Ivory film - although I've always been sad that Nature didn't oblige the filmmakers by providing that deluge of violets. They had to make due with barley and field poppies. But the point of this passage, and the reason i love it so, is what it represents: the moment when one simple beautiful gesture can transform an entire life.
