Luxury rarely announces itself at Acqua di Parma. Instead, it unfolds slowly, through proportion, restraint, and time. With Colonia Il Profumo Millesimato, created to mark the Maison’s 110th anniversary, Acqua di Parma offers not a reinvention of its most enduring scent, but a more concentrated expression of its original intent.
Composed by perfumer Alexis Dadier, the fragrance draws from the 2024 white ylang-ylang harvest in Bosy Be, Madagascar. Like a vintage wine, the scent is anchored to a specific year and set of natural conditions, an approach that renders it inherently unrepeatable. “We selected ingredients from a precise harvest to give the fragrance a unique signature that cannot be replicated,” says Giulio Bergamaschi.
The composition opens with Italian bergamot, blood orange, petitgrain, and grapefruit, bright, immediate, and unmistakably Colonia, before moving into rosemary and orange leaves. The effect is familiar yet more dimensional: deeper, slightly darker, and subtly more sensual, without abandoning the luminous clarity that has defined Colonia for more than a century.
Founded in 1916 by Carlo Magnani in a small perfume workshop in Parma’s historic center, Acqua di Parma distinguished itself early through understatement. At a time when fragrance favored intensity, Colonia’s refinement became its quiet provocation. The brand reached its golden age in the 1950s, before being revived in the early 1990s by a group of Italian entrepreneurs, including Luca di Montezemolo and Diego Della Valle.
Today, the Maison extends far beyond fragrance. Its Art of Living collection applies the same sensibility to leather goods, ceramics, candles, and leisure objects, from sculptural candle holders and $1,300 jumbo Colonia candles to refined picnic baskets and seven-thousand-dollar chess sets. The expansion is deliberate rather than decorative. “The art of living has always been within our DNA,” Bergamaschi notes. “We’ve simply accelerated its expression.”
That philosophy is reinforced in The Art of Living Italian, a cinematic anniversary campaign set in Parma and starring Michael Fassbender and Sabrina Impacciatore. More cultural statement than product showcase, the film repositions the Maison’s founding idea, the Italian arte de vivre, as a contemporary way of moving through the world.
Priced at $340 and presented in an embossed glass bottle with a gold medal stamp, housed in Acqua di Parma’s signature yellow hatbox, Colonia Il Profumo Millesimato is not designed to chase novelty. It exists to affirm something rarer: that true refinement, when handled with discipline, remains timeless, and therefore perpetually modern.
