Gelsomino
Santa Maria Novella

Pretty much the only soliflore(ish) jasmine you'll ever need, if you love the wham bam thank you ma'am facet of jasmine in all its indolic glory. I've sniffed enough of today's cumin-soaked dirty birdies and rolled my eyes at enough bodice-ripping purple perfume prose to know that most of that stuff ultimately just smells like unwashed socks and dinner. This, this is the stable boy in the boudoir, the peasant become aristocrat, the crack of the whip by the blushing bride.

I was in Rome for a few days in early April this year.I had promised my long-suffering husband that there would be no perfume. That we would be doing nothing for those four days but walking, eating long, uninterrupted lunches, drinking a cup of coffee without having to reheat it, and having real conversations for four days. I was looking forward to it. It was going to be a blast, you know? All that walking. All that conversing.

And yet, and yet…..perfume conspired to find me.

Did you know that the center of Rome smells like horses? And therefore, like jasmine?

Near the Spanish Steps, rows of mangy-looking beasts are lined up, waiting to drag hot and irritated tourists around the city. There they stand, in deep misery, flicking flies off their rumps with their tails and dumping great big piles of shit all over the cobblestones.

Get near them and the air positively throbs with the smell of hot horseflesh, the heavy miasma of sweated-in dander from their mane, and the inky, dark, quasi-indolic smell of their poo. Add to that the smell of worn leather from their harnesses, and you have a swirling, foetid maze of scent that is similar in many ways to the dirtier facets of a good Sambac jasmine.

Still, I hadn't expected to find my perfectly horsey jasmine bliss in a bottle in the Farmaceutica Santa Maria Novella.

I had conspired to “wander” casually by the Rome Santa Maria Novella location with my husband (having, of course, plotted my route via Google Maps several months in advance). “Oh look!” I exclaimed, as innocently as I could, “A cute little pharmacy! Let's see if they have any Compeed.”

The Gelsomino was the one that grabbed me by the throat. I didn't like it much at first, because it smelled like jasmine essential oils always smell to me - exuberant, fruity, and always (despite the price) slightly coarse or cheap. There were elements of grape jam, melting plastic, fuel fumes, purple bubblegum for kids - a full-throated, smeary Italian jasmine that's all fur coat and no knickers.

My husband said it smelled like cheap soap, specifically the smell of jasmine soap that someone has used to try and cover up a bad smell in the bathroom.

But I was beginning to be intoxicated by its healthy vulgarity, its I-do-not-give-a-shit insouciance, so I drenched myself even further, giving myself a real whore's bath right there in front of the slightly shocked Japanese girl whose job it was to carefully remove the bottles I requested to smell from the massive wooden armoire where they were stored.

Let me tell you, this is a perfume that comes into its own when you walk it around a hot city for six or seven hours. It was unseasonably hot in Rome – already 27, 28 degrees Celsius in early April. As the day wore on, I got progressively grimier, and so did Gelsomino. Now it smelled truly dirty, slightly sour, like human skin trapped under the sweaty plastic wristband on a cheap watch, or the scent of the leather strap on your handbag after it's been rubbing against your bare shoulder bone on a hot summer's day.

My husband sniffed it towards the end, and shook his head. It smells like hay and horse poo and leather now, doesn't it, I marveled. No, he said, you are wrong. It smells like stale piss. Please don't buy that one. Please.

The next day, when I bought it, I consoled my husband by telling him I had bought the smallest bottle possible. “Look,” I said, holding up the teeny tiny bottle for him to see, “Only 8ml.” Oh that's ok then, said my husband, relieved and kind of proud I had taken his feelings into consideration.

(It was the super-powerful, super-long-lasting Triple Extract).

Jasmine is my favorite floral aroma and has been since I first smelled the flower ages and ages ago. I have tried almost every jasmine-dominated fragrance that I've come across and all of them left me disappointed: many greatly disappointed, some slightly disappointed…

That is… until now: Santa Maria Novella's Gelsomine is unquestionably the best jasmine I've encountered outside of smelling the real thing on an temperate evening in the south of Spain…

This is a soft green-jasmine soliflore (extrait, I would guess) with an almost-hidden indole lightly wafting up from its foundation. It has modest sillage and excellent longevity. Superb... just superb...