EAU D'ITALIE: NEW LOOK, NEW FRAGRANCE

Scent is perhaps the most emotional of our senses. It’s also, researchers tell us, the sense that is most closely connected to memory, along with taste. Would it be possible, wondered Marina Sersale and her husband Sebastián Alvarez Murena, to distil the essence of high summer at Le Sirenuse into a fragrance? To transport the wearer onto that terrace above the sea with its heady floral aura and warm terracotta notes, but also to weave in hints of other Positano aromas, from the incense of the town’s mother church to the yellow clover that grows wild in the hills above?

It took three years to answer those questions in the affirmative, years of unceasing testing, planning, and development. The result was Eau d’Italie – the name given to that first fragrance, and to the collection and body line that it would inaugurate.

Launched in April 2014, Eau d’Italie represented a groundbreaking novelty in the exalted world of fragrance design. Before long, some major players began to sit up and take notice. Milan’s fashionista concept store 10 Corso Como added that original fragrance to its meticulously curated selection, and soon other prestigious stockists followed – Bergdorf Goodman in New York, Liberty in London, Colette in Paris, and many others. Meanwhile, Eau d’Italie was growing and evolving into a collection of fragrances and associated body products that took the brand’s growing band of aficionados on an olfactory tour of Italy, from Sicily to Lake Maggiore. Each fragrance aimed to capture a place, a mood, a memory of the bel paese. 

Two decades on from those first animated converations at Le Sirenuse that planted the seed of the idea, the brand has become, in the words of Sebastián Alvarez Murena, “the ambassador of a certain very cosmopolian Italian style, equally at home in Positano, Milan, New York, London or Los Angeles." To celebrate the milestone, Eau d’Italie is presenting a new fragrance and at the same time changing the look of its entire line, while remaining true to the new dolce vita spirit that has always informed it. For the brand’s other co-founder, Marina Sersale, the redesign is not about changing tack but about staying true to its core values: “Since the very beginning”, she says, “one of our great joys has been that of keeping Eau d’Italie always new, beautiful, relevant and part of our times”.