Rome’s Eclectic Past

Rome has never really needed to choose. For two thousand years, the city has absorbed, reinvented and made its own whatever the world saw fit to offer it: Egyptian obelisks rising from baroque piazzas, Moorish arabesques folded into Renaissance facades, neoclassical columns shouldering the weight of modern plazas. This is eclecticism not as indecision, but as a form of cultural identity. And it is precisely this spirit that Bvlgari, the Roman jeweller founded in 1884, has drawn upon for its latest high jewellery collection, Eclettica: A Living Dialogue with Art, unveiled this season in Milan.

Merging Rome’s colourful past with Bvlgari’s unique artistry, the Bvlgari Eclettica collection is where art meets high jewellery in breathtaking fashion.

The first part of the Bvlgari Eclettica exhibition space, the Architecture room.

The collection is vast in its ambition: more than 150 high jewellery masterpieces, 15 transformable creations (the highest number the Maison has ever presented), over 50 multimillion-dollar works, and at its apex, nine extraordinary pieces designated Capolavori, from the Italian for masterpieces. Each of the nine was conceived as the pinnacle of what Bvlgari calls its “artsmanship”, a term the house has coined to describe the particular alchemy between artistic intuition and technical mastery that defines its creative process. This is not mere craftsmanship, the word implies; it is something closer to collaboration between a designer’s vision and an artisan’s hands, a shared act of making that elevates jewellery into something genuinely adjacent to art.

Artistic Disciplines

The Bvlgari Eclettica: A Living Dialogue with Art exhibition was unveiled one gorgeous spring afternoon at the Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milan. Here three main rooms represent the three artistic disciplines influencing the collection’s vocabulary: sculpture, painting and architecture.

A colourful high jewellery necklace displayed in the Paintings space of the Bvlgari Eclettica exhibition.

Sculpture informs the tridimensional volumes. Meanwhile, Painting supplies the chromatic language, where gemstones function as strokes of colour arranged in unexpected harmonies. Then, Architecture introduces rhythm, proportion and the kind of geometric logic that grounds even the most audacious pieces. The result is a collection that doesn’t settle into any single aesthetic register, which is, of course, entirely deliberate.

Bejewelled Collar

Eclectic Embrace high jewellery collar, Bvlgari

Several pieces merit particular attention. Among the Capolavori, the Eclectic Embrace high jewellery collar in white gold draws its geometry from the Moorish mosaics and arabesques of Sammezzano Castle, near Florence. At its centre sits a 10.12-carat octagonal Colombian emerald, framed by pavé diamonds, emeralds and black onyx, each stone custom-cut to function as a tesserae in an architectural pattern. The collar’s 180 modular elements, engineered over more than 1,000 hours, allow it to move with the suppleness of fabric despite its emphatically structural character. It is exactly the kind of piece that justifies Bvlgari’s ambitions for the collection: something that reads, at first glance, as decoration, and reveals itself, on closer inspection, as a feat of engineering dressed as visual poetry.

Tributes to the Serpent

Serpenti Imperial Heart high jewellery necklace, Bvlgari

The Serpenti Imperial Heart necklace takes a different approach to grandeur. At its centre sits a 30.75-carat Golconda-Type diamond, D-IF in clarity, said to have once belonged to a Maharaja. Bvlgari was entrusted with the stone and tasked with conceiving a setting worthy of its rarity. The serpent’s head becomes the diamond’s home, held in a bespoke star-shaped mounting that amplifies rather than competes with the gem’s extraordinary luminosity. At 1,400 hours of craftsmanship, the piece hovers between sculpture and jewel with the assurance of something that has been properly thought through.

Serpenti Illusio high jewellery necklace, Bvlgari

Then there’s the Serpenti Illusio necklace. Working in white gold and constructed from 235 elements over 1,300 hours, the piece presents a serpent rendered not in solid form but in the negative space between diamond-set contours, a bas-relief effect that shifts with the wearer’s movement. A 14.01-carat antique cushion-cut sapphire from Madagascar, set diagonally, anchors a triangular rhythm throughout the composition. The piece belongs, in its logic, to the tradition of abstract spatial sculpture, though it happens also to be a necklace.

Jewellery as Fluid as Fabric

Seres Scarf high jewellery necklace, Bvlgari

A crowd favourite, the Seres Scarf high jewellery necklace, structured in white gold and composed of more than 1,180 individual components assembled over 1,600 hours, drapes around the neck with the fluidity of woven silk. Its sapphires and emeralds recall the chromatic intensity of Tamara de Lempicka’s portraits, while a detachable brooch centred on a 31.90-carat sugarloaf sapphire from Sri Lanka can be repositioned at almost any point along the piece.

Declaration of Love

Incontro Segreto high jewellery ring

For the romantic at heart, the Incontro Segreto high jewellery ring dazzles with quiet conviction. Bvlgari describes the piece as an echo of Francesco Hayez’s The Kiss, interpreted as a toi et moi motif, a signature of the house since the 1980s, as a declaration of unity between two extraordinary gemstones: a 7.85-carat antique pear-shaped diamond of crystalline purity, and a 5.42-carat Colombian emerald of remarkable clarity, its depth velvety and almost painterly. The two stones move toward one another across the ring’s white gold setting, the mounting deliberately minimal, allowing the dialogue between the two gems to unfold without interruption. 

Garden of Colour

Secret Garden high jewellery necklace, Bvlgari

For those drawn to colour, the Secret Garden necklace presents its own quietly compelling case. At its heart is a 26.65-carat pink-orange Padparadscha sapphire from Sri Lanka, a stone of such singular chromatic balance that Bvlgari’s jewellery creative director Lucia Silvestri pursued it for years. In the right light, it appears almost aflame. The setting, calibrated with onyx inlays, purple sapphires and cabochon emeralds, treats the stone not as an addition to a composition but as its origin point.

Beyond Jewellery

Alongside jewellery, Eclettica extends into high-end watchmaking (three timepieces powered by Bvlgari’s manufacture Piccolissimo micro-movement), ten one-of-a-kind high jewellery bags in precious alligator leather with detachable jewelled closures that convert into necklaces or brooches, and three one-of-a-kind fragrances, their Murano-blown flacons finished by Roman goldsmiths with yellow gold and gemstones, each convertible into a wearable brooch or pendant.