Fragrance house

Ortigia Sicilia

Ortigia Sicilia is a privately owned Italian soap and scent company founded in Sicily in 2006 by Sue Townsend. The brand grew from Townsend’s experiments making scents in the gardens of the San Giuliano estate, where she learned about Sicilian flowers before seeking help from perfumer Lorenzo Villoresi. Villoresi is identified as the master perfumer responsible for distilling Ortigia’s perfumes from Sicilian flowers. Townsend designed the packaging, while the brand’s visual identity draws on Sicily’s indigenous plants, colors, aesthetics and cultural imagery; its recurring leopard graphics reference mosaics at Palermo’s Palazzo dei Normanni. The product concept expanded beyond perfume into a broader scent and body-care range including soaps, scents, creams, candles and lotions. Sicily is the foundation of the fragrance range, whose perfumes use plants indigenous to southeastern Sicily and are distilled directly from them. Zagara, based on the orange-blossom flower of the Sicilian orange tree, is presented as Ortigia’s best-known citrus perfume.