Filippo Sorcinelli

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History of the house

Filippo Sorcinelli came to perfumery from the world of sacred art. An Italian artist, designer and cathedral organist, he founded the atelier LAVS in 2001 to produce liturgical vestments for the Catholic Church, a clientele that has included Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. This double life, between the organ loft and the vestment workshop, shaped the imagination he would later pour into fragrance.

He began his perfume project under his own name in 2014. Its founding collection, UNUM, is inspired by Gothic architecture and the incense-filled spirit of the Vatican. The inaugural perfume, LAVS, released in 2014, pays homage to the LAVS liturgical vestment atelier, “a sort of olfactory tailoring” in the house’s words, and set out to evoke the sacred workshop. Reformulated in 2026 for the atelier’s twenty-fifth anniversary, it now rests on incense resin, guaiac and opoponax, and remains the best known composition of the house.

From a first set of perfumes, UNUM grew into a much larger body of work. Sorcinelli then added further collections, notably Extrait de Musique, devoted to the organ, and Memento, presented at Esxence in 2024 and devoted to cathedral sacristies, extending his themes into new emotional and artistic territory. Across all of them he conceives each perfume himself, and the house credits no outside perfumer. In a 2015 interview with the Kafkaesque blog, he nonetheless confirmed relying on a nose who prefers to remain anonymous for the first three UNUM creations, availing himself, in his words, of its experience and technical valence.

The house operates from Italy, with atelier activity centred in Santarcangelo di Romagna and a laboratory in Mondolfo, in the Marche region, alongside the continuing LAVS vestment work. The operating company, Alter duo s.r.l., is registered at via Cavour 33, Mondolfo (Italy). The house presents itself as a lifestyle brand born from a contamination between the arts. Sorcinelli’s parallel practice as a photographer, musician and designer remains inseparable from the perfumes, which he presents as part of a single artistic project.

Filippo Sorcinelli is an organist, and he writes his perfumes the way he writes his music. For each fragrance the house publishes a harmonic evolution in three movements rather than a pyramid of volatility: a subject, a counter-subject, a tail.

The subject is the theme of the perfume, the material everything is built around. The counter-subject answers it and qualifies it. The tail closes.

These are roles, not durations. A subject can be a heavy wood as readily as a citrus: the subject of Ruah is a patchouli, that of Cyber-Sex a mandarin. That is why these three movements do not match the top, heart and base of a pyramid, and why Osmetheca publishes them as the house writes them.

The collections

Filippo Sorcinelli does not run a perfume line so much as a sequence of author collections, each born from a precise obsession (liturgy, the organ, sacristies, the sky, desire) and held together by a single artist’s hand. More than a catalog, it reads as a body of work split into chapters, where perfume extends his music, his photography and his painting. It is this logic of thematic cycles, rather than membership in any olfactory family, that structures the house and makes it worth reading one collection at a time.

UNUM

UNUM is the founding collection, born in 2014 with LAVS, originally a spray meant to scent the liturgical vestments of the LAVS atelier before it became a perfume to wear. That move from sacred textile to skin is the house’s founding act: it sets incense, woods and resins as the matrix for everything that follows. The collection explores spirituality, the Gothic, music and photography, in compositions that are dense and devotional rather than seductive. Opus 1144 offers its most liturgical reading, a musky, vanilla-soft leather that evokes the cold stone of a cathedral. Rosa Nigra instead tilts the register toward a dark, carnal, almost funereal rose, one its materials suggest without any rose in the formula. UNUM matters because it states Sorcinelli’s grammar before any variation: here perfume is treated as an object of worship.

Extrait de Musique

Extrait de Musique makes the artist’s bond with the organ tangible, the instrument at the heart of his music. The bottle itself takes the shape of an organ stop knob, the lever an organist pulls to summon a register, turning the object into a literal transposition of the instrument. Olfactively, the collection tries to render the sound matter of a great organ as incense and smoked woods: air pushed through pipes, the warm dust of a loft. Its strategic point is to shift the very idea of perfume toward synaesthesia, where one smells a sonority rather than a flower or a fruit. In 2026 the collection was reborn with seven new perfumes, ORGAN #1 to ORGAN #7. They come with a 33 rpm record of seven organ improvisations played by Filippo Sorcinelli, one for each perfume, sealing the musical gesture at the heart of the perfumed project.

Memento

Presented at Esxence in 2024, Memento is devoted to cathedral sacristies, the closed rooms where vestments, censers and ritual objects are kept. Where UNUM started from the rite, Memento starts from the place and its memory: the smell of old cabinets, wax, spent incense and impregnated liturgical fabric. The collection thus extends the house’s incense-laden, spiritual writing, but on a more intimate, enclosed, almost archaeological register. It confirms that Sorcinelli advances through successive sacred spaces rather than trends, and that a new collection, for him, begins with a room to be made to breathe.

Atmosphere d’Emotion

Atmosphere d’Emotion turns the house outward, from the sacred interior to the sky and the weather, threaded with biblical references. It is an olfactory exploration of atmospheric phenomena, where each perfume tries to fix a state of the air rather than a classical accord. It gathers three fragrances on fog (Nebbia Densa, Nebbia Fitta, Nebbia Spessa) and three on rain (Pioggia Debole, Pioggia Moderata, Pioggia Forte). Four more are devoted to wind (Ruah, Vento impetuoso, Vento forte, Brezza leggera). The names rise from light to intense, which says the collection’s ambition: to map a single meteorological material in graded densities, like a score of nuances.

Superfluo?

Superfluo? is the house’s most paradoxical collection, born from a body-care line (shower gel, cream, shampoo, partly built around LAVS) before it was enriched with extrait de parfum scents to wear. Its questioning title is a manifesto: starting from the avowed "superfluous" of body care, it argues for a more inward, less ostentatious idea of luxury. Scents like Luce dei Cuori, Dolcissimo Sollievo, La Voglia d’Amare and Ascetic Vanilla play a consoling softness, a perfumery of comfort that contrasts with the liturgical austerity of UNUM. It exists to show the author’s other face: after the sacred and the meteorological, the intimate and the tender.

X SÉ

X SÉ is the house’s most provocative collection, flipping the spiritual project over to explore sexuality and transgression. Where UNUM sanctifies, X SÉ deliberately profanes, with blunt titles like cyber-sex, popper-pop, slightly-b!tch, cruising-area and Quickie and Coffee. The writing turns frontal, urban and nocturnal, treating desire as a field of olfactory inquiry rather than a cliché of seduction. Its presence is necessary to the balance of the work: it proves the house cannot be reduced to church incense, and that one author can hold both the candle and the scandal.

Délire de Voyage

Délire de Voyage gathers limited editions conceived as olfactory art objects, each bottle springing from a lived experience or an event. The collection works like a sensory logbook: Epicentro answers the Marche earthquake, Notre-Dame 15.4.2019 the cathedral fire, Hæc Dies Easter. Unico Suono, a boxed set of three perfumes, answers Caravaggio, and Lux Visionaria the biblical Light and a collaboration with Bianca de la Garza. The word "delirium" is taken in its Latin sense, de lira, "out of the furrow", claiming a perfumery of deviation and circumstance. It is the freest collection in the house, the one where perfume becomes pure commemoration, carving an instant into a material.

Catalog

The house site presents seven perfume collections: UNUM, Memento, Atmosphere d’Emotion, Superfluo?, X SÉ, Extrait de Musique and Délire de Voyage. As of 4 November 2026, the Parfumo database lists 81 Filippo Sorcinelli perfumes.

The house credits no technical perfumer. The Parfumo database, for its part, credits the perfumer Carlo Ribero, which the house does not confirm.

Beyond fine fragrance, Filippo Sorcinelli extends his world with lifestyle lines (home scents Scented Home, car scents Scented Car and body care) that remain outside Osmetheca’s editorial scope, which centers on fragrance for the wearer.

Notable perfumes

The house catalog spans several collections, all conceived by Filippo Sorcinelli. The references below are anchors of the work. Given the breadth of the catalog, this is a selection rather than an exhaustive list.

All Osmetheca entries for the house

Osmetheca has entries for 58 Filippo Sorcinelli perfumes, listed here by year of release.

• 2014: LAVS.
• 2015: Opus 1144, Rosa Nigra.
• 2016: Ennui Noir, Symphonie-Passion.
• 2017: Io Non Ho Mani che mi accarezzino il volto, Nebbia Densa, Nebbia Fitta, Nebbia Spessa.
• 2018: But Not Today.
• 2019: Epicentro, Quando rapita in estasi.
• 2020: Notre-Dame 15.4.2019, Scusami.
• 2021: Cruising-Area, Cyber-Sex, Popper-pop, Reliqvia, Slightly-B!tch.
• 2022: Dolcissimo Sollievo, Lascia ch’io pianga, Luce dei Cuori, Pioggia Debole, Pioggia Forte, Pioggia Moderata, Tu es Petrus, Lux Visionaria.
• 2023: Ambrosivs, Hæc Dies, Lentezza Carezza, Né il giorno né l’ora.
• 2024: Ascetic Vanilla, Basilica di Assisi, Chiesa d’oro, Chiudi gli occhi e poi vedi, Dòmm, La Voglia d’Amare.
• 2024: Notre-Dame Notte di Natale, Pont.Max., Quickie and Coffee, Rosa Fiorita, Sacristie des Arbres, Santa Casa.
• 2025: Brezza Leggera, Fango e Pesca, Oceano Viola, Ruah, Vento Forte, Vento Impetuoso.
• 2026: Gettone, ORGAN #1 · The Chapel of Gladioli, ORGAN #2 · Easter Day.
• 2026: ORGAN #3 · The Engine Room, ORGAN #4 · The Polishing of the Reliquaries.
• 2026: ORGAN #5 · The Saturday Afternoon of Childhood, ORGAN #6 · Stained-glass windows.
• 2026: ORGAN #7 · Organ and Bells for a Newborn, Panna Sotto!.

Olfactory signature

The house signature is inseparable from Sorcinelli’s other arts. Trained as an organist and steeped in the world of cathedrals and liturgical vestments, he composes perfumes built on incense, resins, cold stone, candle wax and fog, atmospheres drawn from sacred architecture and music. The perfumes aim at emotion and image rather than at conventional pleasantness.

Across UNUM, Extrait de Musique and Memento, the work returns to the sacred and the Gothic: the hush of a great church, the smoke of incense, the chill of marble. Sorcinelli frames each perfume as a chapter in a larger artistic project that also includes his photography, music and design, which is why the house reads as the output of an artist rather than a fragrance brand.

Because every perfume starts from his own concept, the catalog carries a single, unmistakable voice even as it grows. The unifying thread is not a fixed accord but a sensibility: a fascination with the sacred and the architectural, translated into scent by someone who knows both the organ and the vestment atelier from the inside.

Perfume composed like sacred music, by an organist who knows the smell of incense and cold stone from the inside.

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