Capucci de Capucci by Roberto Capucci

Time flies, and now this hurts more; sometimes I feel I don’t fit into a reality that changes at breakneck speed. Yet some fragrances are like a window that suddenly opens, returning you to a past that no longer exists. Pure taste of the 80s, of scooters, of house or basement parties full of friends, of the phone booths of my era to listen to first loves… I remember when I was a child, using them on long afternoons away from home. There were no mobiles, so only two options: go to a bar or use those booths, which then seemed a triumph of progress. We never imagined that years later they would become obsolete objects, yet you look at them with emotion. Material traces of the past always soothe, especially in an era of brutal change. I admit that sometimes I feel like a doorless phone booth: outdated, comfortable, and struggling at the same time, inside and outside the world, living on an uncertain frontier. But it’s fine; that’s how years pass, memories accumulate, and distant times, different rhythms, almost lost values, are recalled. And here comes the culprit of this digression. Capucci is a chypre, but not one that hits you straight in the face. It is light and silky, the trail delicate and close, but do not underestimate it. A sober, fine, elegant fragrance; for modern noses, something slightly old-fashioned but pleasantly powdery and very attractive, with just the right power to make me constantly sniff my wrist. The prelude can even scare noses not inclined to the vintage, seeming sharp. When the heart blooms, it reconciles you with the world. Beautiful, very fine and elegant, all the flowers combine brilliantly, none too striking, overlapping to decline into a base also floral, yet so wonderfully trapped in a velvet bed that it almost melts you. It could be a worthy alternative for all who seek to hunt down a Le Dix without spending a fortune, with the difference that while Le Dix unfolds in a green cream note, Capucci wraps you in a peach and apricot velvet coat. I would not go back in time; the rhetoric of the good old days is not mine. But I would like to spend a few brief holidays in the past: a weekend a year, just to recover the self of yesterday (what I was and will never be again) and relive atmospheres and fragrances definitively lost, dissolved by the passage of time.