Courtesy of Satinine. Photo by Max Rommel
The lights have come back on behind a doorway just off
Milan’s Duomo, one modeled on the entrance of an aristocratic
palazzo, and with them a name that had been resting in the city’s
archives since the age of carriages. Satinine Milano
1883 has reopened after decades of silence, carrying a
past that is entirely true and beautifully documented, the kind
every young maison dreams of borrowing. Crossing its threshold
feels like opening a letter sealed more than a century ago and
finding the ink still fresh.
Courtesy of Satinine. Photo by Francesco Reggiani
Lorenzo Usellini opened his perfume
atelier in 1883, in a Milan enchanted by the Belle Époque, and by
1910 he had raised a palazzo on Via Broggi where laboratory and
family lived under the same roof, the way painters once lived above
their studios. Working beside his son Carlo
Antonio, a chemist of rare talent, he composed the
fragrances that carried the name far beyond Italy in the early
Thirties, the sultry Orchidea Nera and
the aristocratic Caccia alla Volpe,
poured into flacons by the celebrated Vetrerie Bormioli.
Cinema entered the ledger in 1958, when Sophia
Loren, freshly celebrated at Venice for The Black
Orchid, lent her face to the perfume sharing the film’s title.
The resurrection belongs to Andrea Galletti, a
Milanese entrepreneur who traced the house through decades of paper
and glass before co-founding Profumieri Milano
with Ridgely Cinquegrana, former president of
Loewe. Together they inherited an archive of some 150 surviving
objects, now displayed like relics behind glass, and a laboratory
in the Dergano district where every formula is composed in-house.
The boutique itself, christened Officina, was conceived by interior
designer Mara Bragagnolo as a passage through
Milanese memory, in Lombard terracotta, oak paneling and cathedral
glass, while Martina Frattura shaped a light so
soft it deserves its own adjective, satin.
Courtesy of Satinine. Photo by Max Rommel
Italo Calvino once imagined a dandy
chasing a vanished perfume from salon to salon, and the reborn
catalogue reads like a sequel he would have savored.
Caccia alla Volpe still rides through
leather and spice with patrician composure, though its formula,
once rich in animal essences, has been rewritten through green
chemistry, leaving the fox to survive purely as legend.
Bugia Bianca translates a white lie into
fragrance, all salt on summer skin and a romance both parties will
politely deny. Caffè Corretto distills
the very Italian art of correcting espresso with a drop of spirit,
turning morning ritual into gourmand mischief. And Amor
Fati bottles the Stoic invitation to love one’s fate,
gratitude rendered fruity and spiced, a philosophy Marcus Aurelius
would have recognized, if never worn.