Lucia Silvestri was just 20 years old when she began her career in the Bulgari gemmological department.
As often happens in the case of true love, she was instantly enamoured by the world of precious stones.
Lucia Silvestri
Lucia Silvestri
She fell in love, she says, “with the colours, the variety and the energy that I felt emanating from the gems”. At that point she chose to leave her biology studies and dedicate all her passion and enthusiasm to gemstones. The Bulgari brothers quickly intuited Lucia’s great potential, a talent to be nurtured, and decided to teach her the trade. As Lucia tells it, “I was the right person, in the right place, at the right time!”.
At the ripe old age of 20 she began travelling the world, meeting with the world’s foremost gemmological experts, not to mention countless others in the field of jewellery with the most refined aesthetic sensibilities handed down through generations. Geneva, New York, Antwerp, Jaipur, Colombo… every trip was filled with unforgettable discoveries that became experience and, over time, expertise.
Before taking on the complex and delicate responsibility of acquiring gems, she spent years sorting and selecting the semi-precious stones purchased by the Bulgari family. This was the mid-‘80s, when there were only 5 Bulgari shops in the world and the entire process of creating a jewel involved only a tight circle of family insiders, to which Lucia gained access through her intelligence and skill, participating in the magic of the birth of Bulgari’s astounding jewels.
“One of the first things I learned”, Lucia recounts, “is to select and then acquire gems only if I could see a possible use for them, which means that in the very act of purchasing, before the design and realization phases, I was imagining compositions of colours and forms that might suggest the pieces of jewellery that they would become”. A creativity that is expressed, then, in the first instant of contact with a given stone, one that gives rise to forms and chromatic combinations that are often unexpected; that become, through the work of Bulgari’s designers and expert craftsmen, the exceptional one-of-a-kind pieces of the brand’s luxurious high jewellery line.
Over the years, Lucia consolidated her autonomy to the point where she was doing the job that only the Bulgari brothers had done in the past – Director of Gem Acquisitions.
She travelled extensively, sometimes with the brothers, sometimes alone, in which case she would describe to them the cut and colour of a given gem by phone, unthinkable unless she had earned their total trust and proven her affinity with their tastes, acquired after decades of working together on a daily basis.
On June 1st 2013, Lucia realized her lifelong dream by becoming Bulgari’s Jewellery Creative Director, reaffirming yet again her passion for precious stones and her extraordinary creative flair.
