16 hours Ago By Jocelyn Silver
This summer, I took a trip to Italy. And in the spirit of Orange County residents designing Tuscan kitchens, I have attempted to bring it home with me. I now set my table with iron candlesticks from a Roman flea market and lace from a stall in Venice.
I dot my salads with aged vinegar from Castroni , and sip an herbal digestivo made by friars in a medieval cellar while doing so. All this behavior is pretty annoying, and my friends are sick of asking where I got something, only to be told, with misty eyes: “Porta Portese in Rome.” But the one arena where I get no complaints? The olfactory.
Because now, deep into my tragic, study-abroad-like obsession, I am obsessed with church smells. Churches, cathedrals, chapels, and basilicas are all standard stops for any tourist visiting Europe. In Rome, these are famously filled with works by Caravaggio, Bernini, Michelangelo, and the like— all available to admire for less than a euro, so long as you’re willing to pop a coin in a slit to turn the lights on.
But in addition to the visual splendor and overwhelming sense of awe one feels beneath a cathedral’s soaring vaulted ceilings, I love the scent: cold stone, smoking candle wicks, incense. Pontifical incense has always been available for purchase, and there are official Catholic candles that evoke the aroma of mass. Now, thanks to various geniuses in the fragrance industry, it is shockingly easy to bring all of the cathedral scents (stone included) into the home.
My apartment—formerly a godless zone for only the profane, not the sacred—now feels holy. When I first attempted to replicate the scent of a centuries-old European church in my Los Angeles apartment, it only felt appropriate to turn to a centuries-old European manufacturer. Cire Trudon, founded in 1643 in Paris, makes the world’s most covetable candles, delicately perfumed creations in hand-blown glass vessels inspired by the shape of a champagne bucket.
Trudon provided candles to the Imperial Court in France; in 1737, the company motto became, “They work for God and the king”—“they” being the Trudon bees. The fruit of the bees’ labor is, of course, very expensive. Trudon’s classic Spiritus Sancti scent, with notes of incense vapors and labdanum, nods to altar candles and amber, and is meant to transport the burner “under the nave of a cathedral, [where] the jubilant choir and the holy scents rise into the souls.
” (I think that, by manufacturing high-quality, beautiful products over the course of 300 years, the people at Cire Trudon have earned the right to be dramatic.) Despite the way the fragrance is described, thick with spice and redolent of swirling plumes of smoke, the candle is strangely light, never overpowering. Its head notes contain aldehydes, chemicals that can make a scent smell effervescent and clean, like fresh laundry, or new frost, or sunlight—maybe even the kind that streams in through stained glass.
My personal favorite Trudon is Carmélite , a candle inspired by the Carmelites, a hermetic religious order founded on Mount Carmel in Palestine in the 12th century. The Carmelites are dedicated to contemplation, and Carmelite nuns pray for eight hours a day, cloistered in monasteries where they’ve taken a vow of poverty. So it tracks that their namesake pricey candle is inspired by mossy, cold stone walls.
Carmélite features notes of geranium, orange, cardamom, clove, patchouli, violet, cedar, and sandalwood, and yet somehow, there it is: cold stone; earthy moss. On my quest to find the perfect church-inspired scent, it was that aroma of stone that cited me most. Maison Oriza L.
Legrand, a French fragrance house founded in 1720 by the perfumer of the court of Louis XV, has a hero scent: Relique d’Amour , my favorite perfume ever, which also comes in the form of a soap (the dramatic boxes are great for lighter storage). Relique d’Amour boasts notes of white lily, foliage, frankincense and myrrh, and various woods and resin extracts, and it lives up to its inspiration: “the abandoned chapel of a Cistercian abbey, cold stone walls, covered in moss, the scent of waxen wood, of the tabernacle and ornate pews.” Oriza L.
Legrand’s olfactory pyramid does not include the words “cold,” “stone,” or “moss,” but they’re all there. The stone wall is so real it feels like you could stick your forehead to it. The 800-year-old perfumery Santa Maria Novella (or, if you want to be official about it, the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella) traces its roots all the way back to a garden tended by Dominican friars at the convent of Santa Maria Novella, which adjoins the apothecary in Florence where you can buy their wares today.
The house makes one of the greatest church-scented products that money (and not even that much money) can buy: the Carta d’Armenia burning papers , coated in a proprietary blend of resins and spices. The papers come in a little red box printed with gothic typeface; you fold one up like an accordion, light it in an ashtray, and let it slowly burn, filling the room with ecclesiastical vapor. There are also newer home scents that still feel like they belong in a cathedral, or at least on the set of a Like a Prayer -era Madonna video.
Just take 19-69’s Female Christ —patchouli, red thyme, wintergreen, benzoin—inspired by a 1969 performance piece by artists Lene Adler Petersen and Bjørn Nørgaard in which they sent a naked woman carrying a cross through the Copenhagen Stock Exchange; or Rien by État Libre d’Orange —incense, rose, black pepper, oakmoss, aldehydes—described as “a venial sin on the verge of becoming mortal.” (Incidentally, this is how I hope to describe my upcoming weekend.) Sure, all these scents may feel a bit off for the dog days of summer—or, if we’re being more precise, the early days of fall—when you want to cling to the smell of the beach, or something clean and sunny, or tropical.
But in a weird way, what serves as a better form of nostalgia for warmer climes than a church smell? If you went on a Euro summer vacation (did I mention I went on a Euro summer vacation?) think of it this way: You are walking on a narrow street, and it is very hot with little reprieve, because in Europe they don’t believe in air conditioning. The gelato is melting down your arm and you cannot order an iced coffee, because they don’t make it over here. But you can always do one thing: enter a cool, dark cathedral, sit down, and breathe.
.
