The “Annibal” candle takes you on an impossible journey, a unique feat through mineral and wood, rocks, ice and the silhouettes of hieratic trees under the stars. In his shoulder bag, the Traveller carries his story with oriental patchouli, his audacity with cumin, his courage with leather and his dream with jasmine that shines likes the clear light of a lamp.
“There is a path to the top of even the highest mountain.” This Afghan proverb strangely echoes the Latin proverb attributed to Hannibal, who allegedly pronounced this sentence in response to his generals explaining to him that it was impossible to cross the Alps with his elephants: “I will either find a way, or make one”.
Hannibal Barca, one of the greatest military tacticians in history succeeded in his incredible bet by passing across the mountain range in the autumn of 218 BC on a route that remains a mystery to historians, who have piled up hundreds of hypotheses for two centuries. While crossing the mountain, the strategist loses thousands of men and many elephants, but he terrifies the Po plain and all of Italy by his mere presence and his 20,000 exhausted men. Worn out with fatigue before descending from the heights, we imagine the soldiers and the fearless general dreaming of flowers, of jasmine, there where there is only wood: the fragrant wood of travellers, cedar, the distant fantasized wood with an inebriating scent, cashmere wood and finally wood that warms cold nights, smoked and leathery birch.
Coming from the Phoeniciann its theophoric name also carries with it this dazzling light, the papyrus of legends, the hopes of incense smoke from Hamilcar Barca, his father, general of Carthage, and the anise cumin spice of the Punic city. “Hanni-baal” means “the one who has the favour of Baal”, the almighty terrible god and “rider of the clouds” living on a mountain is thus allied with “Barca”, the “lightning”, here, that of patchouli and of wax of the lantern candles that radiate their magical heat. We imagine him with his army riding these mythical, almost fantastic creatures, his combat elephants wearing the leather of the ornate saddles of Carthage. He still provoked immense respect but also a supernatural fear in 183 BC, when he died, the time when the epitaph on his tombstone in Libissa, in present-day Turkey was engraved: “Hannibal is lies here.”
Under the cypress trees, lies the memory of a never extinguished unmatched glory, of a crazy dream, and of the mountain air at dusk when the Pleiades fade away.
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