November 3, 2025 |
Independent, homegrown designer-jewellers and artist-goldsmiths are transforming the Italian jewellery industry, which is focused around the commercial manufacturing centres of Valenza and Vicenza, in the north of the country. This select group of designers and craftspeople are elevating the art of the jewel through intense creativity, innovation and emotion.
Giorgio Bulgari
Giorgio Bulgari, 48, the designer behind Giorgio B, has big, elegant, Italian-made shoes to fill. The son of Gianni Bulgari, the visionary and former CEO of Bvlgari, Giorgio grew up immersed in the world of design and modernism. His childhood was spent watching his father sketch and visualise design concepts, not only for jewellery but also watches, cars, dashboards and pens, objects of all varieties and purposes. He absorbed a sense of proportion, balance and an understanding of modernity.
Born in New York, raised in Rome and educated in the US, Giorgio tried to duck his destiny at first. In the pursuit of independence, he was diverted from a career in advertising and drawn into finance. He enjoyed the challenge, adrenalin and energy of the trading floor. And in the dotcom Noughties, it was the quickest path to independence. But, he recalls, after a while he felt “the calling” of the design world, particularly the watch business. So when his father asked him to return to Europe to work with him on a watch project, he was ready. Learning fast, Giorgio took the lead on a fine jewellery collaboration with Ferragamo and joined Marina B, his aunt’s jewellery brand, as artistic director. “My aunt was daring and adventurous. It triggered my desire to do something on my own.”
In 2017, he began working on private commissions, which fuelled the impetus to design his own collection. He spent the next two years defining a personal aesthetic, launching his first collection in 2023 with a perfectly conceived series of contemporary jewels: Palma, inspired by botanical prints of palm leaves, and Goccia, a voluptuous interpretation of a water drop. Both are distillations of emotive motifs, yet Giorgio’s stylised, sensual designs follow modernist principles. It is his aim to elevate the jewel through design excellence, just as his father was driven to bring integrity to objects of everyday life.
Giorgio says he is strongly influenced by his father but also by 1930s modernism, grounded as it was on the beauty of the machine. Yet he finds inspiration in every decade since, too, especially in the social, cultural and artistic upheaval of the ’60s and ’70s, and the unfettered glamour of the 1980s. He understands conventions of jewellery, presenting bold scales and massive proportions. Just as his father “always liked to break the codes”.
The energy of Palma’s fronds is controlled by a crisp silhouette, the effect of sunlight achieved by the gold, while the newest iterations come in vibrant blue titanium, diamond-dotted, or super-chic matte grey. Similarly, the exuberant volumes of Goccia’s retro vibe are countered by the simplicity of enamel embedded with globules of gold or cabochon gems. “Jewellery is not only gems, it needs to go through a process of design, with an element of wit,” he says. “It has to be just right.” And Giorgio B is the man to get it right.
Goccia ring in rose gold, black enamel and topaz cabochons by GIORGIO B
Fabio Salini
Fabio Salini, 62, is widely acknowledged as a master of modernism, his avant-garde jewels sought by the most sophisticated collectors. For 25 years, he has been on a mission to develop a distinctive visual language. Most of all, as he says in a new book (Fabio Salini: Rebel Jeweller, which I am the author of), he is determined to lift jewellery out of the category of minor or decorative arts and into the realm of contemporary art. It is not about aesthetic or narrative, it’s about a jewel with something to say about the world.
Born and raised in Rome, Salini studied geology at its university, feeding a childhood fascination with gems and minerals. He then worked for Cartier, then Bvlgari, before joining his family’s construction business. He continued to dream of jewellery by sketching ideas, buying gemstones and having designs fabricated in Rome workshops. In 1999, he showcased his work at Petochi, one of the oldest Italian jewellers. The Bulgari brothers, Paolo and Nicola, both bought jewels at the show. Buoyed by this success, and particularly by the purchase of a necklace by Queen Rania of Jordan, Salini founded his company in 2001.
Salini was determined to replace the traditional focus on intrinsic worth with emotional, artistic value, rebelling against showy status-symbol gems. To this end he explored different materials, experimenting with silk and leather to give diamonds a fashion-forward, rock ’n’ roll edge, with stingray or galuchat, which are organic and evocative of 1930s luxury, and oxidised copper, bronze, ebony and more.
He played with age-old signs and symbols to restore the magical power and purpose of the jewel and fuse past and present. Salini’s favourite motifs, like knots (a symbol of love) and netting (a reminder of Mediterranean life), often suggest keeping people and precious objects close; he gives gold a starring role. Polished to a sheen, it amplifies the colour and light of gems, injecting visual excitement and structural complexity. Eventually, these experiments led Salini to titanium and carbon fibre: both space-age, industrial, un-jewel-like materials; titanium introduced vibrant colour and lightness, while carbon fibre absorbed light and opened up textural possibilities. It reminds him of Victorian Whitby jet mourning jewels, so deeply emotive, but he also loves the idea of velvety blackness. Salini relishes the engineering aspect of working with carbon fibre, which enabled him to work with geometric forms to create striking contrasts, an important element of his work and personality. His jewels are uncompromisingly contemporary and technically brilliant, with an architectural purity that provokes wonder and captures today’s spirit of techno-modernism. The true preciousness of a jewel, he says, has to be revealed slowly, understood profoundly and, most of all, cherished by the wearer.
from left: Crystal bracelet in white gold, rock crystals, cabochon sapphires, pearls and diamonds, Cappio Ring in white gold, carbon fibre and diamonds by FABIO SALINI
Giovanni Corvaja
The goldsmith-magician Giovanni Corvaja, 53, perpetuates Italy’s great heritage of working with gold, taking craft skills, techniques and creative expression to a new level of virtuosity. Corvaja follows in the illustrious footsteps of the famed goldsmiths of the Padua School, a movement that started in the mid-20th century, led by Mario Pinton and Francesco Pavan, with the great artist-goldsmith Giampaolo Babetto one of its leading exponents. These goldsmiths aimed to focus on gold itself as the primary material, on technical innovation and avant-garde modern design while also paying homage to ancient goldsmithing traditions, including breathtaking Etruscan granulation and the sculptural artistry of Renaissance goldsmiths, including Benvenuto Cellini. Corvaja was born in Padua and from a young age developed an impassioned love for metals, especially gold. It is a love that has blossomed into near-obsession, as he enjoys a deep physical and metaphysical relationship with the noble metal, which he sees as a symbol of perfection.
Aged 13, Corvaja attended the Pietro Selvatico art school in Padua, where the Padua School of goldsmithing began, and was taught by Pavan. Only five years later, he was a skilled goldsmith. He went on to study in London at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1992 with an MA in goldsmithing, silversmithing, metalwork and jewellery. On his return to Italy, Corvaja moved to Todi, an ancient hilltop town in Perugia. Since then, he has immersed himself in research and experimentation, moving between laboratory and studio, blending art and science. He mastered the wondrous, challenging technique of granulation, as perfected by the Etruscans – tiny grains of gold fixed to a gold surface, as light as a frost – a demanding skill considered to be the apogee of the goldsmith’s art.
Corvaja has developed ingenious, awe-inspiring techniques that enable him to craft jewels of mesmerising beauty, intricacy and purity, most notably his Golden Fleece series. Captivated by the myth of Jason and his quest to find the golden-winged ram, he set out on his own quest to create a modern-day – real – golden fleece. The result of intensive research and technical ingenuity, the golden fur he handcrafts is composed of the finest strands or threads of gold, a fifth of the thickness of a human hair. The lush gold fur covers a bangle, ring, pendant, headpiece and brooch, its architectural simplicity of form living in contrast to the tactile, sensual fur.
The Golden Fleece was followed by Cloth of Gold, a reimagining of Renaissance vestments and princely garments. After months of research, trial and error, Corvaja hand-spun a handkerchief of woven, supple, silky gold threads, a magical object that showcased a transmutation of gold from metal to fabric. Corvaja’s jewels are madly sought-after by collectors and given pride of place in museum collections around the world.
Golden Fleece ring in 18k gold by GIOVANNI CORVAJA
Regina Gambatesa
As much a philosopher or anthropologist as a designer, Regina Gambatesa, who is in her fifties, pours intense emotion into her jewellery to create gems that are modern-day amulets or, as she calls them, “ornaments of feeling”. Each creation has a deep-rooted meaning and message, both atavistic and current, and each is the result of research and contemplation. Gambatesa was born in Bari and spent her adolescent years in Turkey, Lebanon and Libya, which ignited her imagination and exerted a profound influence on her understanding of cultural connections. Later, she returned to Italy to study architecture at the University of Naples, but from an early age jewels and gems had inspired a sense of wonder. After graduation, Gambatesa absorbed the late-1970s atmosphere of social, cultural and artistic revolution, of postmodern architecture and radical product design. She then met Paolo Trizio, who comes from a renowned family of jewellers and moved back to Bari, where they began working in his family business, Enrico Trizio, creating highly conceptual jewels as, she says, “ritual objects to bring you closer to your interior”. Around the same time, she and Paolo began a collaboration with GianCarlo Montebello, the Milan-based designer.
Gambatesa continued to study, design and create her bestselling serpent jewels. Her relic jewels, pendants and rings, conceived to be much like medieval reliquaries, are crafted from amber or rock crystal and filled with gold dust, an expression of the preciousness of the natural world. Nature remains an inspiration, as in her Leaf and Blossom collection, and in Germoglio, the ring in which a heart grows from a flowering seed. The Mandala series balances geometric and organic forms, the evanescence of matter, with the softly folded square of polished or matte yellow, grey gold or titanium embedded with a gemstone. Gambatesa works with luminous materials to convey and perpetuate the deep mysticism and spirituality long associated with jewels, exploring the relationship between body and ornament. She fuses deep-rooted cultural references and associations with elements of fantasy and imagination.
In 1999, she opened an experimental exhibition space, showing her collections and one-of-a-kind creations, some organic, others geometric, with the aim of stimulating a new dialogue around the meaning and power of jewels. There she explores the power of communication, finding new ways to tell an age-old story, revive the ritual and energy of the talisman, and most of all generate an emotional response, deep in the unconscious.
Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 75 – BIRTHDAY, EVOLVE, TRANSFORMATION – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
from left: Anello Serpente ring in hand-glittered 18k grey gold and diamonds, Mandala ring in 18k gold, hard oxide-coloured titanium and diamonds by REGINA GAMBATESA
Meditation Mandala ring in 18k yellow gold, rock crystal and pure gold dust by REGINA GAMBATESA
