By Maria Gabriela Rocha. Cover image Meo Fusciuni and Federica Castellani, Istituto dell’Odore.
There are projects you notice during a fair and others that remain in your head once you have left, and Istituto dell’Odore was one of the ideas we kept thinking about after Pitti Fragranze 2026 because it asks us to imagine perfume almost as a document, capable of preserving something invisible before it disappears. Created by Meo Fusciuni and Federica Castellani after years of working together on the project, it takes the form of an imaginary grey concrete building where scents can be archived and carried into the future, starting from the possibility of an “olfactory desert” in which some smells might eventually survive only through memory. Each fragrance begins with a specific raw material and becomes part of a growing catalogue devoted to shared olfactory memories, while the perfume creator takes on the role of an archivist deciding what deserves to be protected for the future. The first five fragrances arrive in October 2026, although the idea behind them feels much bigger than a collection: if our olfactory world really were an archive, what would we choose to keep?
What exactly is Istituto dell’Odore?
Fusciuni and Castellani describe the project as a manifesto of olfactory futurism, built around the idea that an intimate memory triggered by smell can also belong to a wider collective experience, because the same raw material can take different people back to completely different moments while still creating an immediate sense of recognition. Istituto dell’Odore is therefore conceived as an archive that can continue expanding over time, collecting materials for the emotional associations they carry and reconsidering the role of fragrance as something capable of keeping a sensory memory alive long after the original experience has disappeared.
Iris È Nata a Berlino: when perfume becomes identity
The first fragrance takes us into Berlin’s underground nightlife, where nobody knows a woman’s real name and everyone calls her Iris because of the perfume she wears every evening, a gift from her mother that slowly becomes the way people identify and remember her. Iris È Nata a Berlino places iris absolute at the centre of a composition where galbanum gives the opening a greener tension and sandalwood and cedar bring depth, while jasmine, violet and musk allow the scent to linger like the trace of someone who has already left the room. The story fits naturally into the logic of the archive because the woman herself remains elusive while her perfume becomes the element through which her presence survives.
Mandarino Smile: turning a winter ritual into fragrance
Mandarino Smile begins with one of those small winter rituals that can unlock an entire memory in seconds: peeling a mandarin and leaving the skin on a radiator until its scent slowly fills the room. Green and yellow mandarin are joined by blood orange and bergamot, while a marine accord changes the texture of the citrus before jasmine and magnolia soften the composition, transforming an ordinary domestic gesture into precisely the kind of shared memory the project wants to preserve, familiar enough to belong to many people and personal enough to take each of them somewhere different.
Hotel Vanilla: a fragrance of desire and absence
With Hotel Vanilla, the archive moves into a more intimate story, following a man who regularly meets a woman and carries the smell of vanilla away from each encounter until that aroma becomes the strongest surviving memory of a relationship destined to fade. Vanilla is surrounded by coffee and saffron before cocoa and suede deepen the composition, with tobacco, oud and benzoin adding a darker atmosphere that takes the ingredient away from its most familiar associations and connects it instead to desire, absence and the way scent can hold onto a moment after the people inside it have moved on.
Litania d’Incenso: capturing the feeling of suspended time
Litania d’Incenso enters a colder and more meditative territory, beginning with the image of a marble-like incense and exploring those moments when time seems to slow while we wait for something to finish or disappear. Incense sits inside a dense structure where birch and cade lead towards myrrh and benzoin, creating a scent connected to suspended time and to the strange way certain aromas can remain attached to emotionally charged moments, returning years later with enough force to recreate an atmosphere we thought had vanished.
Banana Circus: from childhood to pop imagination
Banana Circus changes the mood completely, using banana as the starting point for a memory that belongs both to childhood and to a wider pop imagination, with the story unfolding around a small provincial circus and its eccentric characters. Banana meets chocolate and popcorn before tuberose and suede pull the fragrance into a stranger territory, allowing a smell we usually associate immediately with taste to become something more ambiguous on the skin, while the combination of personal recollection and cultural imagery makes it an especially fitting final example of how Istituto dell’Odore turns a familiar raw material into an archive of different possible memories.
