Italy Perfume

ITALY

There was, for a season, a particularly enthusiastic little forager living beneath the Italian sun.

By day, she was a preschool teacher with a mushroom hat. In her spare time, she made mushroom art… or perhaps simply spent an unusual amount of time digging around in other people’s gardens. The distinction became increasingly difficult to determine.

It was a beautiful place for digging.

Beyond the old stone walls, citrus trees grew heavy with fruit beneath the Mediterranean sun. Neroli and orange blossom drifted through the warm air, jasmine climbed the garden walls, and rock rose grew wild along the hillsides.

The little forager, however, was considerably more interested in what might be growing in someone else’s garden.

She dug for stories, gathered conversational scraps, collected things that weren’t particularly valuable, and carried her little basket away with enormous confidence. A fragment here. An assumption there. Something overheard, something misunderstood, and several things apparently cultivated entirely in the dark.

It was rather like the Game of Telephone, except one would have expected the preschool teacher to understand how that game works.

After a while, the woman who tended the garden noticed something curious about the forager’s questions.

So she became helpful.

Very helpful.

Among the orange blossoms and jasmine, she planted a few carefully selected truffles that had never grown anywhere at all: harmless little details, distinctive enough to recognize should they ever sprout somewhere unexpected.

The forager departed delighted with her harvest.

The woman returned to her garden and waited.

Eventually the brilliant Italian sky darkened. Rain swept across the hills and struck the sun-warmed stone paths, releasing that unmistakable mineral scent of petrichor into the air. Moss darkened against the old walls. Patchouli and damp earth mingled beneath the trees while sandalwood drifted warmly from somewhere beyond the garden.

And then, in another garden entirely, one of those imaginary truffles appeared.

Then another.

And another.

Not merely appearing, either.

They had been arranged into an entire landscape, embroidered, embellished and presented with the extraordinary confidence peculiar to people who never consider checking their sources.

Well.

That answered that.

Apparently the little forager had an art-making friend who considered himself something of a gardener too.

He hadn’t merely accepted her harvest.

He had cultivated it.

He took fragments, assumptions and things that had never happened at all and transformed them into commentary about the very woman who had planted them.

An ambitious undertaking considering the quality of his research department.

Apparently nobody had explained the danger of constructing a portrait from information supplied by the portrait. And, as with any carefully composed portrait, what the audience saw was no accident of the brush.

The woman said nothing.

She simply walked through her garden after the rain, beneath orange trees and jasmine, while petrichor rose from the stones.

She already had the answer she wanted.

There was, however, one final problem with being a professional collector of mushrooms:

eventually, you may be tempted to eat your own inventory.

And the little forager did.

Unfortunately, the mushrooms she’d spent the season cultivating were poisonous… not to the body, but to credibility.

Assumptions had been seasoned into facts. Gossip had been preserved as evidence. Imagination had been confidently labeled observation.

And she swallowed the whole story.

By the time she discovered that some of her prized specimens had been planted specifically to see where they would turn up, she’d already carried them to the gardener, watched him cultivate them, and helped serve the resulting dish.

A remarkable achievement in self-catering.

The poison worked slowly.

First went the credibility.

Then the audience.

And eventually the little mushroom stall itself.

Another Italian summer came and went.

The following season, the marketplace opened beneath the same golden sun. Citrus ripened on the trees. Neroli and orange blossom perfumed the warm afternoon air. Jasmine climbed the old walls as though nothing particularly interesting had happened at all.

The woman returned.

The other gardener’s masterpiece remained somewhere beyond the hills, still displaying several mushrooms that had never existed.

But the little forager?

She never made it back.

In any case, mushrooms are left out of ITALY perfume. After seeing what happened the last time someone cultivated them, it seemed the more sophisticated choice.

Besides, the garden already had everything it needed: orange blossom and jasmine above the earth, moss and patchouli below it, and petrichor rising from the stones after rain.

Some ingredients add complexity.

Others merely contaminate the composition.

Perhaps the mushrooms had better prospects.

Or perhaps she’d finally discovered the difficulty with cultivating things in the dark:

eventually, you have to live with what grows there.

Rain eventually returned to the Italian hills.

It fell over rock rose and moss, soaked into the patchouli-dark earth and struck ancient stone until petrichor filled the garden again. Sandalwood lingered warmly beneath it all while the last traces of jasmine and orange blossom floated through the evening air.

The woman never needed to accuse anyone of carrying tales.

She never needed to demand explanations.

She didn’t even need to correct the resulting portrait.

She already knew which details were impossible.

She invented them.

Some people leave an impression.

Others leave evidence.

And occasionally, with sufficient confidence, they eat their own.

ITALY — Neroli • Italian Citrus • Orange Blossom • Jasmine • Italian Leather • Sandalwood • Patchouli • Baked Earth • Moss • Rock Rose

90% Organic Ingredients.

Clean Perfume. Rooted in Nature.