Perfumery

The twelfth entry is l’analisi dello spazio di testa, and the middle of it is a calque of an English word that does far more at home than it does here. In Italian lo spazio di testa is one thing only: the air standing above a flower, or above a liquid, which an instrument samples so that a scent can be read without cutting the plant. « Headspace » in English starts in the same place — the gap between what is in a bottle and its cap, the room a filling line has to leave and a chemist has to draw on — and then goes two ways Italian never followed. It is the clearance above a moving part, measured before a lid will shut. And it is, in ordinary speech, the state of somebody’s mind: « I am not in the right headspace for this » has nothing to do with air and everything to do with whether a person can face the afternoon. The Italian phrase carries none of that, which is why it can be read flat: it is the space at the top, and the analysis is of what is standing in it.