‘Smoking embers of sacred wood offered as a gift, as a ritual seal of an austere and elegant silence, where the fresh and luminous scents of citrus fruits contrast with the depth of smoked woods, in a continuous olfactory whirlwind, where an arbitrary incense coats and envelops with the its mineral metallic notes, in search of a horizon in which the sacred and the profane merge in a purple fraternal and indissoluble embrace. The atmosphere that I breathed during the functions held in the Basilica Santuario Maria Santissima del Mazzaro in Mazzarino, my mother’s birthplace, where the embers of an austere and clerical incense smoking from a laborious Sunday thurible united in an embrace indissoluble to the enveloping breezes full of citrus fruits, woods and resins which, from the surrounding fields, filled the baroque naves of a church full of charm and mysticism.’ – Claudio Zucca
