A scented legacy
Living with the sea on your skin. Waking up to the scent of lemons. Walking through the alleyways at night with the fragrance of linden trees in bloom. Growing up in Genoa means carrying an olfactory archive within you without even knowing it. A vocabulary made of salt, bright colors, and nature that enters the city without asking permission. Scent is our language.
1990. VIA QUARTO 17, GENOA.
My mother, Maria-Cristina, opens the Mar-Mar perfume shop, with its door facing directly onto Priaruggia beach. A few years later, when I start elementary school, that perfume shop becomes my afternoon. I lose myself among the essences, the soaps, the bottles of the world's great perfumers. I play with perfumes with a curiosity I still can't name.
She had very clear ideas. And the customers, the loyal ones, knew it. She chose fragrances like one chooses important things, with the intuition of someone who knows how to recognize beauty without having to explain it.
Thirty-five years later, I understood that intuition was mine too.
MarMar is my mother's gaze meeting mine. Her Genoa and the one I rediscovered upon returning. It's not nostalgia, but a conversation that continues.
We create fragrances as one continues something one loves - a transformed legacy, a way to share Genoa with those who haven't yet encountered it.
Follow Your Sea. My mother followed hers. Now we follow ours.
- Filippo Fornasini, founder of MarMar
Our fragrances are odes — to living memories, to those moments when Genoa surprises you without warning, to a city where the echo of the sea resounds endlessly between its palaces and lanes. We draw inspiration from the scents of Genoa — its urban flora, its hidden gardens, the salt that permeates everything — to create olfactory interpretations that awaken the sea within you.
What we seek is not perfection — it is contrast. Like the shifting colours of Genoa, like its architecture that blends the sublime and the everyday, the raw and the precious.
Like the wind rose that is our symbol, our fragrances guide you, carrying with them the secrets of a city that lives and breathes with the sea.
Follow Your Sea is our mantra.
Because everyone follows a direction that feels true to them. Ours is to create perfumes in Genoa and carry the fragrant beauty of this city into the world.
