Launched in 2010 by Italian niche line Memento Italian Olfactive Landscapes, October 1st 6pm Belvedere Villa Borghese – Roma, like all their fragrances, is a scent designed to link a memory of a specific place and time. 

I’ve been to the Villa Borghese in Rome a few times. It’s a large landscape garden with museums, buildings, sculptures and attractions, but It’s the smell of the place that’s stayed with me over the years.

October 1st 6pm Belvedere Villa Borghese opens with a bright, elegant note of bergamot flanked by a sweet, sunny Mandarin orange. A delicate note of elemi adds a piney freshness to the citrus fruits. As it settles, powdery, earthy orris root creates an erotic mood heightened by aquatic accents that give the impression of a cool, caressing breeze. I smell rum, which adds boozy warmth to the heart, while green, woody olibanum places us in a mystical garden. There are woods in this garden, too: cedarwood, vetiver and patchouli.  The vetiver is a veil of earthiness, and the patchouli is dark and sensuous.

The drydown is elegant and intimate and beckons to be smelled, but the way this scent is paced makes it so crave-able. There’s room in the fragrance for each impression to shingle down to the next, creating a sensory sequence that pulls me in deeper and deeper; it starts with a sunniness that transitions to dusk, moves from the erotic to the mystical, and evokes summer, moving to autumn.

I love wearing this fragrance and linking new memories to it.

Notes:  bergamot, Mandarin orange cedarwood, elemi, Mandarin orange, olibanum, orris root, aquatic notes, rum, olibanum, cedarwood vetiver, patchouli.