Basilica di Assisi

I initially started this review with an explicit phrase. I deleted it because I realize it might be in bad taste in juxtaposition with this particular fragrance. I do, however, want to stress how good this fragrance really is. It is blank good. Obviously this is quite NICHE. Not for beginners. Not for people who will enjoy vanilla cupcake or strawberry fragrances. I can already hear the complaining come from those heads. This particular line is a collection of olfactory paintings depicting different basilica around the country of Italy. This one in particular is Assisi and it is easily my favorite. Fillipo is a master at creating incense. We all know this. We all should know this. But here he also captures a gentle breeze through sheer curtains alongside a balcony in the morning. It creates a moment of reflection, but simultaneously a moment of excitement and joy for the new day. It's not a happy fragrance, but almost like a feeling of faith. How he does that I have no idea. But it comes from a man that has all of these feelings inside of him already. It's all about sculpting. Sculpting, to me encompasses the concept behind the bottle. The hand of the pope. The symbol of hope Joy reflection and perhaps solitude. There is something in here that reminds me of a very specific smell I used to love when I was younger. There was a nature store a couple miles from my house a long time ago. They used to carry hand made soaps and when you walked into the store the smell would hit you in the face. And it smelled so good. There was a particular patch soap that was my favorite. I just did not know what it was when I was a child. I just adored it. That store closed decades ago, and I never found out what that smell was. There is a piece of that in here. And I have to have it. I highly recommend you try this fragrance.

Thankfully, I don't get lemon cleaner vibes. This was a blind buy and a successful one. A hand for the cap...why not? Little crazy, but looks fantastic in a collection. Hope to add more in the future. I thought my next amber/balsamic scent purchase would have been Black Gemstone. I was wrong. But not mad. This is right up my alley. Calming amber. Instant favorite for me. Slight sweetness. Very enjoyable.

this a beautiful fw day time fragrance although i think it can suit one well in the ss too. the dried fruits compliment the citrus so well and the freshness of the earthy, raw, and herbal/floral elements round this out quite beautifully. all incense from this house is done so right

Another masterpiece from Sorcinelli. I can't describe this fragrance, it's beyond this realm. It smells biblical and mysterious but it's not a churchy scent, it's angelic. I think Archangel Michael smells very similar to it.

In the opening I got an ozonic-feeling violet leaf and a green, slightly bitter galbanum duo (especially at the start). I looked to see if anyone felt the same as me and found them. When I sense things that aren't listed I feel the need to check... Anyway, this is an airy, sweetish, both fresh and warm, bold-resinous scent. There's a leathery patchouli in there, and especially the benzoin warmth has wrapped around everything. It's like you've taken shelter in a cozy corner but a slightly cool breeze from the forest is hitting your face... And this breeze carries the greenery of fresh and aromatic herbs. The incense feel isn't the sour olibanum style, it's very very warm and enveloping. The atmospheric feel is strong, but if you're hoping for gothic, eerie, dark or sorrowful things, this doesn't have them. In the drydown the styrax becomes more prominent, getting warmer and more leathery. Liked it. It would be wonderful in autumn and winter especially... Among the comparisons I saw Opus 1144, I don't think it's quite similar. That one has a strong elemi feel and is a louder, darker scent compared to this. It might just be that the house's DNA is noticeable, or maybe the connection was made because of the benzoin softness. The more I smell it, the more it sits somewhere in my brain between Shaman (Min New York) because of its patchouli, and Luxe Calme Volupté because of the way the green, fresh bitterness meets resin. Tag(s): warm+cold, leathery, patchouli, ozonic, bitter-green, resinous

Opens fresh and aromatic with lemon and herbs with an unsetting green note that disappears quite soon - i'm guessing it must be patchouli since i'm not particularly fond of it The fragrance then loses the fresh aspects and fully develops into a warm ambery incense which is a hint spicy

Was Saint Francis of Assisi a drunk? Basilica di Assisi certainly seems to suggest so. The announcement by the hesperidic and green woody top is short of an attention span, giving way very quickly to a rosewater and fruit heart that has a warm, woody, and earthy labdanum note creeping in from the base that, together, smell decidedly wine-like or mead-like. Fermented fruits, caramelly wood cask notes, sugars - it’s reminding me a lot of a framboise, or sweet wine, or something close to that. It’s quite pretty and effervescent, no alcohol heat to be found, no halitosis from the lush that’s had too much of it. Effortless and easy. The dry down to the skin scent is a warm, earthy, woody, caramel amber made solely from labdanum, benzoin, tonka bean, and perhaps a touch of patchouli. Basilica’s main issue is much like that of a drunk short of attention. The durability, richness, and character of the accords presented are very embarrassing for an extrait. The words coming from the mouth of the inebriated are slurred and ill-defined, at no moment are we able to stay on topic, and they’ve passed out in a small handful of hours. Basilica is a bit of a disappointing mess. Someone get Francis a cup of black coffee, please.

Smells like straight old people im sorry. Like baby powder and herbs. I wished i liked this one i love sorcinelli normally but this one is a miss for me. Also the main accords on here feel completely wrong, it smells floral and herby with maybe a hint of amber. It is however very fitting to its description. Very churchy but more in the way of an old dusty catholic church surrounded by a flower field on a windy spring day with a congregation of 80 year old women in terribly done patchy makeup wearing 1477 by Mäurer and Wirtz lead by a priest who probably should have retired years ago.

The only one in this collection that I really cannot appreciate :( My first associations are "old men". There is something floral in it, that gives it a fresh hint but it has an old-fashioned effect. I smell something medicinal and balsamic in this too. Over time the patchouli gets stronger and stronger. I voted for 'I hate it' because I really cannot stand it on myself or anyone. On the other hand I find it really fitting, if I had to guess what a catholic priest smells like, I imagine it exactly like this.

Very (VERY!) similar to Shalimar.

Smelling the blood of the altar (15 fragrances, one confession) There’s no soft way to say this: Filippo Sorcinelli doesn’t make perfumes. He makes olfactory liturgy with incense, resins, animalic notes, and a concept so solid it hurts. I tested all 15 fragrances from his catalog, and I didn’t come out the same. Something moved. Something broke. Filippo Sorcinelli was born in 1975 in Mondolfo, Italy. By the age of 13, he was already playing the organ in cathedrals. Later, he founded an atelier for sacred vestments and became the tailor for popes: Benedict XVI, Francis, and now Leo XIV. A practicing Catholic. Openly gay. A man who dresses the Vicar of Christ and formalized his relationship with another man under the law. He is not a character. He is a walking paradox. His fragrances are not “church smell” in a touristy sense. They are damp crypts, burned incense, old wax, rotting wood, wilted flowers, dense resins, a trace of skin, a trace of sweat, a trace of something that shouldn’t be there but is. They don’t seduce. They put you in front of a mirror and force you to smell the contradiction: crypt and body, sacred and profane, ritual and desire. There is a fragrance that smells like an old church after Mass: residual incense, extinguished wax, cold stone. Another that smells like a convent garden at dawn: white flowers, wet earth, a shadowy herbal base. Another that smells like skin and desire: animalic notes, leather, sweat, a sexual edge that unsettles anyone seeking comfort. Another that smells of something fecal—not cheap scatology, but a reminder that the body exists, that flesh is not an accident. These are not perfumes to wear. They are sensory portals to territories few dare to name. He himself says that perfume is “the art of smell,” a language that needs no figurative references, but in his case is intimately tied to memory, spirituality, and matter. Every name and every bottle functions like chapters in a story where the sacred and the profane contaminate each other. Fragrances like *Ennui-Noir* are presented as an “ode to boredom” understood as fertile fullness, a space where “the impossible becomes possible” and where the perfume forces you to look at yourself without filters. Others are inspired by Gothic architecture, relics of the Passion, or even passages from the Gospel of Mark, translated into olfactory experience. It’s no coincidence that someone who designs vestments for Mass also explores the animal, the sexual, and the fetish. His Catholicism is not cardboard; it is a faith that assumes the paradox of a desiring body within a doctrine that has historically policed it. What is he trying to tell us? Does he know something we don’t? Does he throw the stone and hide his hand? He asks us to understand his madness or, at least, not to judge it. I say he deserves more: to be looked at straight in the face, without any halo of divinity. If he walks, creates, smells, and bleeds, he is mortal. And precisely for that reason, he is fucking original and free. How much is fiction and how much is reality in Filippo Sorcinelli? Impostor or Renaissance man? Antichrist or Christ? I don’t know. But his 15 fragrances forced me to stop, smell, and think. And that, in 2025, is already a miracle. Sorcinelli deserves credit not for being “good” or “bad,” but for opening a path in contemporary perfumery where incense and flesh, crypt and desire, sound—and smell—like something very few dare to name. His perfumes are not easy. Some unsettle you, others hypnotize you, several force you to think. If you seek comfort, go elsewhere. If you want a perfume that pulls you out of your comfort zone and forces you to smell contradiction, stay here. Don’t close this review with a “like / dislike.” Close it with a question: what part of you moved when you smelled Sorcinelli? What part resisted? What part recognized that the altar and the bed, the censer and the body, the divine and the carnal, are not opposites, but two sides of the same coin?

If Heinrich Lossow's painting "The Sin" got a modern perfume brief, but plot twist - the nun is doing laundry, and instead of a garden variety horny priest, she's being visited by a biblically accurate angel, all burning eyes and razor wings and divine perversity. It's giving Clovis Trouille's ecstatic scandalous nuns but make it fresh linens and benediction. A slutty nun chypre laundry musk that somehow makes perfect sense. Sacred and profane, bleached and debauched.

Very nice, no complaints. Pine and petigrain and soft ambrosia maraschino almond fruit. Just received so will develop. Had to buy, originally from San Francisco. Good buy. Price was sooo right.

The odour of wiping a counter top down with lemon surfacant with an old dirty musty cloth.

It's Must de Cartier. If you like Must, you will also Like this.

Old timey hubba bubba transition to baby powder