The scent of sfusato lemons

Sfusato Amalfitano is the long, thick-skinned lemon grown on terraces from Vietri to Positano. It is protected as a traditional crop, harvested by hand, and carried down paths that are too steep for a cart. The peel is thick enough to candy, the oil in the skin strong enough to perfume a room.

When we say a candle or a soap is made with Amalfi lemon, we mean this fruit — cold-pressed on the coast, not a lemon-type fragrance blended elsewhere. You can tell the difference the way you can tell a tomato grown in Campania from one that only looks like one.

Walk a grove at nine in the morning in June and the air is green, sharp, a little salty from the sea below. That is the scent we bottle. Not a holiday souvenir. The actual smell of the work of the groves.