The Most Elusive Scent Of All

A tale told by a dimension - a living consciousness to which some psychic minds are attune to. A tale about the Sicilian Mafia in the 18th century. The consciousness projects mental images of this period. Images of people, faces rarely distinct, in different situations. The opening words of Chapter 8 is one way to explain such projections: With night came a fierce storm with thunder and lightning and dark visions. Maria slept poorly, tossing and turning. The tale is developed to fit cohesively into those images. A tale about a Way of Life - not about organized crime. In the depression of the 1930s it was the gangster Al Capone who organized soup kitchens for hungry children in Chicago USA such a compassionate deed. Why? To aid the very poor is as much a trait of the Sicilian Mafia as are profits from prostitution. Prostitution always has been one of the largest sources of revenue for the Mafia. The Mafia Way of Life is not easily understood. One reason is that word Mafia is a modern invented word. This tale is about the people that became part of the Mafia in that period, about their background and what led them to accept this Way of Life. People like Pedro, an ox of a man and bodyguard; or Paulo, so talented and saving the life of a woman who would become his wife sets him on a path of no return; of Anastasia and Romeo, a high class prostitute and a killer who fall in love. Central to the tale is the seduction of the first Mafia priest which begins with mysterious notes slid under the church door. in a room full of women I saw her face When the Vatican hears a whisper in the wind young Sister Lucy becomes the key to solving the mystery what does Mafia want with our priests? Some still want the Sicilian Mafia to be a myth but read a modern researched book such as Into the Heart of the Mafia by David Lane and the question you may ask is not who in Sicily is Mafia but who is not? It is a Way of Life ancient in origin. The reader needs to bear in mind too that the original womans perfumes could only be made from an essence of a flower found on a tree that only grows in Italy. Thus the Most Elusive Scent mentioned all too often could have been the first true perfume ever discovered. Any wonder that scent had a powerful effect on men? And if we were to ask the Sicilian Mafia dimension what is the one word that can best explain Sicilian Mafia the answer is si. Italian for yes. Only a born Sicilian can say si and cosa nostra (our thing; our way) the Mafia way of saying those words. In Sicily there is even a Mafia (cosa nostra) museum and it is ever so popular with tourists!

Smell is the most emotional and evocative of our senses: it can bring back memories faster and with more immediacy than a photograph – so why is it so little understood? Armed with a hungry curiosity and a willingness to self-experiment, author Barney Shaw goes in search of the hidden meanings of smells. Using plain words to describe what he finds, he investigates the chemistry, psychology, history and future of this underappreciated sense. Journeying around boatyards, perfume shops and memories, Shaw opens your nose to the world, breaking down "chords" of smells into their component notes and through them revealing new ways of understanding the spaces through which we move. An investigation into the biology, psychology and history of smell, and a search for effective ways to put into words scents that we instantly relate to, but find strangely ineffable, THE SMELL OF FRESH RAIN includes a 200-entry thesaurus of succinct descriptions of common smells.

The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe marks the arrival of early modern material culture studies as a vibrant, fully-established field of multi-disciplinary research. The volume provides a rounded, accessible collection of work on the nature and significance of materiality in early modern Europe – a term that embraces a vast range of objects as well as addressing a wide variety of human interactions with their physical environments. This stimulating view of materiality is distinctive in asking questions about the whole material world as a context for lived experience, and the book considers material interactions at all social levels. There are 27 chapters by leading experts as well as 13 feature object studies to highlight specific items that have survived from this period (defined broadly as c.1500–c.1800). These contributions explore the things people acquired, owned, treasured, displayed and discarded, the spaces in which people used and thought about things, the social relationships which cluster around goods – between producers, vendors and consumers of various kinds – and the way knowledge travels around those circuits of connection. The content also engages with wider issues such as the relationship between public and private life, the changing connections between the sacred and the profane, or the effects of gender and social status upon lived experience. Constructed as an accessible, wide-ranging guide to research practice, the book describes and represents the methods which have been developed within various disciplines for analysing pre-modern material culture. It comprises four sections which open up the approaches of various disciplines to non-specialists: ‘Definitions, disciplines, new directions’, ‘Contexts and categories’, ‘Object studies’ and ‘Material culture in action’. This volume addresses the need for sustained, coherent comment on the state, breadth and potential of this lively new field, including the work of historians, art historians, museum curators, archaeologists, social scientists and literary scholars. It consolidates and communicates recent developments and considers how we might take forward a multi-disciplinary research agenda for the study of material culture in periods before the mass production of goods.

There are nearly 1,400 known varieties of wine grapes in the world—from altesse to zierfandler—but 80 percent of the wine we drink is made from only 20 grapes. In Godforsaken Grapes, Jason Wilson looks at how that came to be and embarks on a journey to discover what we miss. Stemming from his own growing obsession, Wilson moves far beyond the “noble grapes,” hunting down obscure and underappreciated wines from Switzerland, Austria, Portugal, France, Italy, the United States, and beyond. In the process, he looks at why these wines fell out of favor (or never gained it in the first place), what it means to be obscure, and how geopolitics, economics, and fashion have changed what we drink. A combination of travel memoir and epicurean adventure, Godforsaken Grapes is an entertaining love letter to wine.

Ever wondered how perfumes are developed? Or why different scents appeal to different people? The Chemistry of Fragrances 2nd Edition offers answers to these questions, providing a fascinating insight into the perfume industry, from the conception of an idea to the finished product. It discusses the technical, artistic and commercial challenges of the perfume industry in an informative and engaging style, with contributions from leading experts in the field. The book begins with a historical introduction and covers all aspects of the development process - from customer brief to producing a fragrance including; * Ingredients acquisition * Ingredient design and manufacture * Design and analysis of fragrance * Sensory aspects including odour perception * Psychological impact of fragrance * Technical challenges * Safety An updated section on the measurement of fragrance discusses the role of senses in marketing consumer products. This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the perfumery business and includes an extensive bibliography to enable those interested to explore the field further. It also comes complete with a selection of colour illustrations and a fragranced page.

Reproduction of the original: Neither Here Nor There by Oliver Herford

Designing with Smell aims to inspire readers to actively consider smell in their work through the inclusion of case studies from around the world, highlighting the current use of smell in different cutting-edge design and artistic practices. This book provides practical guidance regarding different equipment, techniques, stages and challenges which might be encountered as part of this process. Throughout the text there is an emphasis on spatial design in numerous forms and interpretations – in the street, the studio, the theatre or exhibition space, as well as the representation of spatial relationships with smell. Contributions, originate across different geographical areas, academic disciplines and professions. This is crucial reading for students, academics and practitioners working in olfactory design.

Scent is both an essential and seemingly impossible-to-recover aspect of material culture. Scent is one of our strongest ties to memory, yet to remember a smell without external stimuli is almost impossible for most people. Moreover, human beings’ (specifically Western humans) ability to smell has been diminished through a process of increased emphasis on odor-removal, hygienic practices that emphasize de-odorization (rather than the covering of one odor by another).While other intangibles of the human experience have been placed into the context of the eighteenth-century novel, scent has so far remained largely sidelined in favor of discussions of the visual, the aural, touch, and taste. The past decade has seen a great expansion of our understanding of how smell works physiologically, psychologically, and culturally, and there is no better moment than now to attempt to recover the traces of olfactory perceptions, descriptions, and assumptions. Reading Smell provides models for how to incorporate olfactory knowledge into new readings of the literary form central to our understanding of the eighteenth century and modernity in general: the novel. The multiplication and development of the novel overlaps strikingly with changes in personal and private hygienic practices that would alter the culture’s relationship to smell. This book examines how far the novel can be understood through a reintroduction of olfactory information. After decades of reading for all kinds of racial, cultural, gendered, and other sorts of absences back into the novel, this book takes one step further: to consider how the recovery of forgotten or overlooked olfactory assumptions might reshape our understanding of these texts. Reading Smell includes wide-scale research and focused case studies of some of the most striking or prevalent uses of olfactory language in eighteenth-century British prose fiction. Highlighting scents with shifting meanings across the period: bodies, tobacco, smelling-bottles, and sulfur, Reading Smell not only provides new insights into canonical works by authors like Swift, Smollett, Richardson, Burney, Austen, and Lewis, but also sheds new light on the history of the British novel as a whole.