Queen Victoria loved roses, Princess Sissi iris, Catherine de’Medici bergamot, and when you are a member of a royal family, you just have to snap your fingers and a personal perfumer will appear to create a perfume with your favourite scent notes. A selected group of people in Zagreb had such an honour when a real artist came to visit. An artist of perfumes, the famous nose Paolo Terenzi from the family niche fragrance house Tiziana Terenzi.
In the Martimex perfumery at the Ban Jelačić Square in Zagreb, in front of journalists and fans of perfumes, Terenzi held a fascinating three-hour interactive workshop. In front of the audience, he created personalised scents, one of which he named after Zagreb – “Zagabria”.
Talented, unconventional and lovable, he is a connoisseur in creating fragrant stories, sensations in the world of beauty. He is a professional musician with a degree in law and philosophy, but he also studied chemistry and physics. He has unlimited poetic imagination and sensibility and is known to be fond of working with natural raw material that he collects on his many travels. His fragrant library includes between 200 and 300 precious notes which he skillfully mixes and creates fragrant compositions that brought him the nomination for one of the most prestigious awards in the world of perfumes, the so-called perfume Oscars – Fifi Awards.
“Even when you have the best ingredients, it is critical how you mix them and in what proportions because it takes just one drop to cause the opposite effect of the desired. That is why I organise perfume workshops because I want to show that creating the finest scents is like alchemy and that a true perfumer and artist of this craft can motivate anyone to create a unique scent. This time, I was inspired by the beauties of Zagreb and by the spring – by the awakening of a new life – that I translated into the personalised perfume ‘Zagabria’, “said Paolo Terenzi, who heads the niche house together with his sister Tiziana, who is the creative director and designer.
The portfolio of the perfume house, which started in 1968 from a 16-square-metre workshop in the Italian town of Cattolica, is becoming larger and larger. “Our fragrances are born from the feelings experienced during our journeys. Creating a fragrance sometimes take an hour, but sometimes even a whole life is not enough. The Tiziana Terenzi brand was born out of the common passion and creative work by my sister and me. We are always ready to work hard, just like our father and grandfather did before us. We are indeed two souls united in sheer diversity, with a common mission of creating unique fluid, visual and tactical emotions,” said Paolo, adding that their business is a kind of homage to their father, a memento of love and memories of the father with the desire to celebrate his heritage.
The passion for travel and the effort to bring the feel and the spirit of visited locations, to collect the memories and to pass on the fragrance to someone else, is also carried by V Canto, the Tiziana Terenzi’s sister brand. Inspired by Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, the V Canto fragrances tell stories about travel and love, and stories are packed into perfume bottles with rare and precious essences that make them unique and unforgettable. “Our perfumery is artistic, and we do not care about the trends that will be forgotten tomorrow. We want to create a miracle in the bottle that will withstand time and fashion, fluid emotions that blend with the skin and pervade the person wearing it,” concluded Paolo Terenzi.
More lifestyle news can be found in the dedicated section.
