ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
LUCIA SILVESTRI HAS what she regards as the ultimate dream job. She is Jewellery Creative Director at Bulgari, the great Roman house of luxury founded in 1884. A brand recognised throughout the world, Bulgari has been part of the French luxury group LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton since 2011. Under the acquisition deal, the Bulgari family sold its 50.4 per cent controlling stake in exchange for 3 per cent of LVMH, thereby becoming the second-biggest family shareholder behind the Arnaults in LVMH.
It all started for Lucia when she was just 18. She was a biology student, but she had a burning desire to explore the gleaming world of gemstones. And so she took a leap of faith. She gave up biology in favour of gemology, and fate had it that she would meet the Bulgari brothers, Paolo and Nicola.
The brothers are the grandsons of Sotirio Boulgaris, a Greek jeweller who moved to Rome in 1884. It was Sotirio’s grandson, Gianni Bulgari, who internationalised the company in the 1970s, opening shops in New York, Geneva, Monte Carlo and Paris. In 1987, Gianni left the family business after selling his one-third stake in the company to Paolo and Nicola Bulgari. Working with their nephew, Francesco Trapani, who became CEO, the brothers diversified the company in the early 1990s, starting with the release of the Bulgari perfume line.
It was when they were busy transforming their company that Paolo and Nicola ran into Lucia. When she reminisces about their chance meeting, she describes herself as being like “Alice in Wonderland”, while the brothers were the “Princes of Gems”. Her passion showed, and the clearly impressed Roman jeweller family took her under their wing.
And so her three-decade career with Bulgari began. At 20, Lucia began travelling the world to meet with the world’s foremost gemological experts, and in search of the best stones. She went from Geneva to New York, Antwerp, Jaipur and Colombo. These trips trained Lucia to have a discerning eye and a distinctive taste that was up to Bulgari’s incredibly high standards. Finding perfect gemstones is not easy. A necklace could take a year to make because its stones come from all over the world: sapphires from Sri Lanka, spinels from Myanmar, emeralds from Nambia and so on.
“I remember the first time I went to Bangkok to see the city’s best supplier, he had a real tiger roaming on the balcony of his office,” Lucia once told “The next year I went back, he had a wolf! He also had guns... it was very dangerous. That kind of thing was normal back then. I have met some very amazing people. It’s a secret world, nobody knows about it. I could write a book.”
The long process in making a jewellery piece is worth it, says Lucia, because at Bulgari, trends barely matter. “Colour is in Bulgari’s DNA,” Silvestri told magazine. “We don’t care if orange isn’t in fashion this season. We focus on the character and quality of what we design and assemble.”
In the mid-80s, when there were only five Bulgari shops worldwide, Lucia was made responsible for sorting semi-precious stones acquired by the