Summer has finally come. And we know it not because of the children running up and down the house (the school ended between the second and the third week of June in Italy and Spain, it will end at the beginning of July in France and it will open at least until mid-July in Germany and the UK, Ed's note), nor because of the mercury jumping up to 30°. We know it because of the smell.
That smell filling our nostrils early in the morning, as soon as we leave the house or open the window. That smell that is hard to describe, but everybody knows.
We are talking about Proust syndrome - from a famous page of the first volume of the Recherche, in which the writer evokes a scene from his childhood linked to the flavour and scent of a piece of madeleine -: Smells have the power to materialize our most private memories, to trigger our memory bringing us suddenly back to our childhood or to an episode of our previous life, evoked by a simple whiff that is able to fill us with nostalgia, melancholy, joy or sadness. It demonstrates the power of smell to trigger our episodic memory, the guardian of our autobiographical memories.
Proust was dunking a pastry in a cup of tea and remembering his childhood. The good old times. We smell the summer just outside the house and we have different thoughts.
The evening is a hunting ground: the sun goes down later and we feel like drinking something refreshing with our friends. Or even without them. The important is to drink something to heal the dryness. And when it comes to drinking, containers make the difference: if you don't drink the beer directly from the bottle, it deserves the right glass and also the best drink won't make us happy if it comes in a water glass.
Many classics emanate summer vibes, like A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare; Roman Holiday by William Wyler; Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain; The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald; To Kill a Mockinbird by Harper Lee and Light in August by William Faulkner. And what about the great TV marathon of summer love movies? Who hasn't been dreaming at least once of hot lifeguards and naive blondes travelling alone for the first time?
Some of our favourites:
Grease (1978), (Olivia Newton-John & John Travolta) Dirty Dancing (1987), (Jennifer Grey & Patrick Swayze) Mystic Pizza (1988), (Annabeth Gish & William R. Moses) Stealing Beauty (1996), (Liv Tyler & Ignazio Oliva) Cruel Intentions (1999), (Reese Witherspoon & Ryan Phillippe) Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), (Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem & Penélope Cruz) Wet Hot American Summer(2001), (Bradley Cooper & Michael Ian Black)
And to cool off, let's jump in the swimming pool. Your swimming pool, that of some friends, or that infinity edge pool of the residence where you are spending a couple of days. Let's close your eyes: the crickets chirping, the feeling of the sun on your skin, the scent of rosemary and Mediterranean forest, the inextinguishable smell of chlorine on the background. It's the Italian summer.
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