CROWN JEWELS
The allure of Bulgari’s scintillating gems, as played out in the dramatic stories of their owners
Bulgari treasures and their remarkable owners
As Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle and Dorothy L Sayers’ The Nine Tailors attest, gems are the most amazing plot devices. The sparkle of a diamond might drive anyone to theft, madness or murder.
Unsurprisingly, the cabochon emeralds, gigantic cushion-cut sapphires and briolette rubies of the Roman jeweller, Bulgari, have had an equally dramatic effect, and in true life. A new book, Bulgari: Treasures of Rome, chronicles the 134-year history of some of the house’s extravagant jewels through the lives – and the loves – of its most outré clients.
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s tumultuous love affair was reflected in his lavish gifts: a magnificent sapphire sautoir that I held in a trembling hand in Bulgari’s museum on Via Condotti, not daring to try it on; the emerald and diamond earrings and necklaces he gave her before, during and after passionate rows and even more passionate reconciliations in the boutique, under the discreet gaze of Paolo Bulgari, great-grandson of Sotirios, the house’s founder… But there were other, less celebrated though no less flamboyant customers.
Contessa Dorothy di Frasso, an American heiress reminiscent of a Vanderbilt, owned Villa Madama, on the slope of Monte Mario to the west of Rome between 1925 and 1941. She and her husband, the Conte Carlo, had a friendly, though perhaps not very physical, marriage played out in the palazzo that had been designed by Raphael. Despite not being a beauty herself, her lovers included Gary Cooper, possibly Marlene Dietrich, perhaps Mary Pickford and certainly the gangster Bugsy Siegel, according to Vincent Meylan, the author of Treasures of Rome. Increasingly disillusioned with the Axis, the Contessa decided to assassinate Benito Mussolini, with whiskers clipped from the muzzles of Rome’s two captive tigers. These, she claimed, would give the dictator fatal peritonitis if scattered over his food. ‘Were the tigers too old?’ speculates Meylan. ‘Or did they not have the promised power?’ For whatever reason, Mussolini survived; she then sold him Villa Madama, and fled wartime Italy for the US, with the help of Bugsy Siegel and still clutching her Bulgari treasures.
More romantic, though less dramatic than the life of the di Frassos, is the tale of the three-day fiesta that celebrated the marriage of Princess Olimpia Torlonia, scion of the family that were, traditionally, the Pope’s bankers. She wore her mother’s Bulgari tiara on her wedding to Paul-Annik Weiller, a French businessman whose Greek mother had been crowned Miss Europe in the 1930s. ‘Look at their eyes in the photograph,’ enthuses Meylan. ‘It’s true love.’
Part detective, part historian, Meylan interviews the makers, sellers and wearers of the precious stones and their descendants. In this he achieves more than the whodunnits of the past – he makes the jewels themselves come alive.
‘Bulgari: Treasures of Rome’ by Vincent Meylan (£55, ACC Art Books) is out now.