We did not name our fragrances in Latin by accident.
Latin is the language of precision. Botanists still use it to name new species because it resists the drift of meaning that living languages are subject to, the word Rosae meant rose two thousand years ago and means rose today, and will mean rose long after the word "rose" has evolved into something slightly different in ten languages across the world. Latin holds things still. It is a language built for permanence.
That seemed right for us.
Ficum
The fig. Ficus carica. One of the oldest cultivated plants in the world, grown in the Mediterranean basin for at least eleven thousand years, appearing in the Bible, in Homer, in Roman agricultural manuals. The smell of a fig tree is one of the stranger things in the botanical world: milky and green and earthy all at once, a smell that manages to be both tropical and ancient.
The fragrance we call Ficum begins there: in the leaves, sharp and vegetal, and ends somewhere warmer, in the dark flesh of the fruit itself, in the earth the tree grows from.
It was one of the first we made. It smells, to us, like late summer in the Veneto.
Rosae
The genitive case. Not simply Rosa, "the rose", but Rosae, meaning "of the rose", belonging to the rose. The distinction matters. This is not a rose perfume in the way a soap is rose-scented. It is a study of the rose: the stem, the water in the vase, the petal at the moment between opening and falling.
The rose has been used in fragrance for four thousand years. There is a reason for that. It is one of the few flowers complex enough to sustain attention, it does not smell like one thing, it smells like many things in sequence. We tried to honour that sequence.
Vinum
Wine. Or rather, the vine. The wood of old barrels. The purple darkness of a Venetian cantina in winter, bottles stacked in the cool.
Vinum is not a sweet fragrance. It opens darkly, with something almost leather about it, and softens slowly into warmth. It is a winter candle, though people use it in any season.
Aqua
Water. But specific water, cold, saline, wide. The Adriatic in October. The lagoon before the city wakes. There is a quality to sea air that is almost impossible to describe and immediately recognisable: mineral and alive and slightly melancholy.
Aqua is the lightest of our fragrances and, in some ways, the most difficult. Water is not a smell. But salt is. Wind is. The absence of things on a cold morning is.
Rosmarinum
Rosemary. Rosmarinus, literally, "dew of the sea". The Romans planted it along coastlines. It grows on limestone, in dry heat, in places where everything else has given up. Its smell is one of the most ancient in the human olfactory memory: resinous and green and medicinal and alive.
Rosmarinum begins with the clean freshness of the herb and deepens, in the base, into something almost incense-like. It is the fragrance that most clearly smells of a place.
1889
The only name in our collection that is not botanical. A year, not a plant. Named for Maria Cecilia Bellati, our muse, born that year in Venice.The fragrance is warm, amber, dark wood, something preserved. It smells of rooms that have been lived in carefully. Of things kept, not discarded.
Six fragrances. Six Latin names. Six ways of describing something that was always there, waiting to be named.
Forma Comptus. The words are Latin too. It means: given form. Made with elegance. Made beautiful.
