Antonio Alessandria
“Since when I was a child I revealed great attention to all the senses. I vividly remember the smell when my parents were ready to go out: my father’s cologne and my mother’s scent that in my imagination was the smell of a bracelet she loved to wear, but now I know it was her fragrance Chanel N°5. I am deeply convinced that a fragrance can trigger the most elusive memories, buried in our brain. When I start composing a fragrance I always try to tell a story in terms of olfactory emotions.
The encounter with Anselm was different. He only told me about the family of the fragrance: a gourmand, or a floral, or a combination of the two. At first I felt lost, like a writer in front of a white page. Then I started thinking about a combination of ‘gourmand’ and ‘floral’, I tried to find something, a flower that could seem appealing for its ‘taste’. I remembered a special kind of tulip often depicted in old Flemish still-life paintings. The ‘Semper Augustus’ was the most expensive tulip during the Tulip Mania. Red stripes on a white petal. I worked on the idea of a flower and added ‘tasty’ facets.
When Anselm told me the name he chose for the fragrance - ‘In Flagranti’ - I immediately visualised the story! During the Tulip Mania, a man tried to steal a Semper Augustus. Bewitched by the beauty of the flower and by its smell, he couldn’t run away when the owner of the tulip came. The thief was captured ‘in flagranti’.”
