★For all curious readers, a journey through 50 smells: from fresh cut grass to rain, from tempered pencil to petrol, from new car to lipstick, from whiskey to leather.

Interest in the world of perfumes is growing, at the point that in the laboratories of the Institute for Sustainable Heritage in London scientists are trying to build a “conscious archive” of our collective olfactory experiences, a sort of library of the memory of smells, in order to preserve those that have a historical value and to be able to reproduce them in the future.

From this idea was born the book by Roberta Deiana, food stylist and passionate about cooking. It is a challenge of talking about something intangible, invisible, but exciting for anyone. In fact, smells are powerful and have the unique ability to tell and evoke stories, in an intense and all-embracing narration, shared by everyone. Also, many of them remind us of something from our past, they are our memory. The author, starting from a sort of olfactory alphabet and a historicalcultural investigation, tries to build a collection of the most significant smells in order not to forget them and to try to imagine new ones.

ROBERTA DEIANA is passionate about the five senses, both for the fullness they add to life and for their beauty. The taste and the sense of smell are the ones she loves the most. Hence her multifaceted professionalism: as a food stylist she talks about food with images, as a perfume writer she describes smells through words. She is the author of several books related to cooking and twice winner of the Selection of the Bancarella Kitchen award with Piccolo ricettario per cuochi perdigiorno (Bietti, 2010) and Sesso, droghe e macarons (Sperling & Kupfer, 2016).