The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Ciao Amore is named for Leonetta Luciano Fendi, daughter of Silvia Venturini Fendi, a woman of the family's third generation, raised inside the Maison the way most children are raised inside a language. Perfumer Fanny Bal was given a brief that was less a formula and more a feeling: the particular light of a Roman summer afternoon, the intimacy of family tables, the casual elegance of someone who never tries. What emerged from that brief is not a literal portrait. It is an impression, the green bitterness of fig leaf against white floral warmth, held together by tonka's quiet persistence. The 2024 collection arrived as a precursor to Fendi's 2025 centennial, seven fragrances built from family memory and Mediterranean material. Ciao Amore is the one that speaks to the women who came before, in a voice that is soft without being fragile.
What makes this composition unusual is how the fig refuses to behave. In most fig fragrances, the fruit leads, creamy, lactonic, warm. Here, the leaf arrives first, sharp and bitter, as if the tree itself stepped into the room before the fruit. The Tunisian orange blossom absolute then enters as counterweight: clean, waxy, with just enough indolic warmth to keep it from reading as soap. The tension between these two, green astringency and white floral softness, defines the fragrance's character for the first hour. The tonka bean absolute does not rescue or sweeten; it simply extends, adding a warm coumarin base that lets the florals linger close to the skin rather than throwing them outward.
The evolution
The opening lands sharp and immediate, fig leaf's green bite cuts through whatever else is in the air. It is not unpleasant, but it announces itself without apology. Thirty minutes in, the orange blossom arrives and the composition shifts. The floral note is clean, slightly waxy, Mediterranean in its restraint, not the heady indolic orange blossom of Middle Eastern perfumery but something brighter, more airy. Underneath, a lactonic creaminess from the fig fruit begins to surface, tempering the leaf's bitterness. By the second hour, the fragrance has settled into its drydown: tonka bean's warm coumarin closes the composition, keeping everything intimate and close to the skin. Moderate sillage means it does not fill the room, but it stays, six to eight hours on most skin types, quieter in the final act but never entirely gone.
Cultural impact
Ciao Amore arrived in 2024 as part of Fendi's first standalone fragrance collection, preceding the Maison's 2025 centennial. In a fragrance landscape crowded with fig interpretations, it chose the leaf over the fruit, a green, slightly astringent honesty that sets it apart from the genre's sweeter conventions.
