Good morning to all of my dear friends with golden hearts…
Today I would like to tell you what ignited my passion for the world of jewlery. Everytrhing started at the young age of four or five, at that time my family and I were spending the summer in a big house of my grandfather on the Argentario, or to be more precise in Porto Santo Stefano.
As often happens in a beautiful and big family house on the sea, every year between July and September, all the family from my father’s side was visiting us, uncles, aunties, close relatives and distant relatives… And in particular lots of cousins between the ages of two and sixteen. Every corner of the house was filled with kids and family members, it was our Disneyland…
You can’t even imagine the joy I felt during those months, I was literally living a dream. Every morning our parents would take us by car to the boat where we would spend those warm and sunny days together…
Saturday was the day of the market. I would go only with my mother but with the promise that I would never walk far from her, otherwise she would have punished me… I was loving every second of those walks, the colors, the smells of the market, the stand with the dry fruits, but in particular this wonderful exhibition of small and colorful jewels, even though the majority of them were pieces of colorful glass or plastic. Yet in my head with the fantasy of a child they became something precious, transforming myself in a princess of a fairy tale, like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty…
The love for the small markets is still very alive in me, it’s a big passion that has never left me. (You can ask my partner, he can confirm this to you, poor him.)
But the detail that I remember with most tenderness is when the older sisters of my dad came to visit us in the summer house, three elegant and austere ladies, about whom once upon a time it was common to define them as part of the elengant bourgeois of Rome.
In my memory, my aunties were personalities between Crudelia Demon and Tata Matilda… Very serious and elegant ladies, always wearing an enormous amount of jewels, usually very showy and marvelous…
The myth of the “cruelty” was somehow created by my mother, who somehow enjoyed to watch us little kids getting scared by those famous scary aunties…
But the curiosity to have a close look at those jewels that my anties were wearing was stronger then any other fear… For example, I still remember perfectly a necklace of diamonds and pearls from the Victorian era, another memory is a ring so shiny that it would reflect the light in the entire room… But probably the most vivid memory is a ring with the shape of a golden snake, adorned with emeralds and with a big diamond of at least three carats on the forhead of the snake… (Auntie if you’re reading this, I would like to inherit it.)
As you can imagine, it was like having a whole set of jewlery available (at least to look)… Precious and antique jewels, stones with the perfect cut and with an incredible brilliance, handmade models so rare and precious that nowadays they’re almost impossible to find…
My anties were fully aware of the fascination I had for their precious jewels, so sometimes they alloweed me to wear them while telling me amazing and exiting stories about the origins of those precious pieces and how they obtained them…
My dear friends, all these momories and emotions, even today that I’m an adult I still ask them to borrow me some of their precious jewels…
I’m sorry if today I’ve been less technical and more personal… But it’s very beautiful to be able to share this with you…
Till soon my precious friends…