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.