PROFUMO DI CAMOMILLA
It’s incredible how a smell can bring back a memory you didn’t even know you still had.
It happened to me this summer.
I was back in Trentino Alto Adige after many years, hiking nella vallata, surrounded by all that green, those beautiful little paths, wildflowers everywhere… when suddenly I smelled something familiar: la camomilla.
And for a second, I wasn’t there anymore. Sono tornata bambina!
Growing up, my parents used to rent a little house in the mountains in Piemonte, around the Bardonecchia and Sestriere area, and for many years that became almost our second home. We went in every season. Weekends during the year, entire weeks in the summer, and then obviously winter, when everything changed completely and the same mountains became covered in snow. La stagione sciistica.
So many pieces of my childhood happened there.
But the funny thing is that if you asked me to describe those years, I don’t think the first thing I would remember would be a particular house, a ski slope or even a specific place.
I would remember a smell. The smell of chamomile flowers.
There were these beautiful distese di camomilla growing in the mountains. Tiny little flowers everywhere, almost insignificant if you look at just one of them, but together…semplicemente bellissime. Un profumo delicato.
You would walk through the fields and smell it in the air. Not strong, not overwhelming. Just this soft, clean, slightly sweet scent that became part of the landscape without you even realizing it.
At the time, of course, I didn’t think any of this was particularly important, I was a child and those flowers were simply there, semplici fiori.
I’ve always loved plants and flowers, even when I was very little, so walking in the mountains was basically an endless treasure hunt for me.
Ogni stagione has its own flowers.
There was the time of the papaveri, with entire fields suddenly covered in those beautiful bright red flowers with their little black centers. I remember how delicate they were. You picked one and almost immediately had to be careful not to destroy it.
Then came the ranuncoli, i narcisi… I don’t even know what the names in English would be!
All those little mountain flowers that seemed to appear from nowhere and then, a few weeks later, were gone.
I remember walking with my nonni per una passeggiata, picking i fiori along the way.
Normal childhood, back then I didn’t think there was anything special in that…
And somehow, without knowing it, all those smells were being stored somewhere in my memory.
Years passed and I don’t think I ever consciously thought, “I miss the smell of chamomile in the mountains.”
You don’t really miss something you’ve forgotten. Lo dimentichi.
Until, this summer, there it was again. Eccolo di nuovo! In a completely different part of Italy, at a completely different moment of my life.
I stopped walking. “Questo profumo lo conosco.”
And suddenly I could see everything.
Those summers in Piemonte, the fields, i fiori, le passeggiate con i nonni…
That’s what I find so fascinating about smells.
A photograph brings you back because you’re intentionally looking at something from the past.
A song can do the same. But a smell? Un profumo doesn’t ask for permission.
It just finds you.
You can be walking somewhere, thinking about absolutely nothing, and suddenly a perfume, a flower, something cooking in a kitchen, even the smell of someone’s house can open a little door you had completely forgotten was there.
And you’re back, sei tornato proprio a quel momento.
Maybe it’s tomato sauce simmering on the stove and suddenly you’re in your Nonna’s kitchen.
Maybe it’s sunscreen and you’re eight years old in August.
Maybe it’s someone’s perfume and, for just a second, you think of a person you haven’t thought about in years.
For me, that day, it was camomilla.
And I think the most beautiful part was realizing that the memory had never really disappeared.
It had simply been waiting for the right profumo to bring it back.
Ciao,
Laura