Bulgari has debuted its latest high jewellery and watchmaking collection, Aeterna, with a star-studded event in Rome.
At the city’s Terme di Diocleziano, a beautiful open-air museum, the Roman jeweller presented over 500 new creations, spanning high jewellery and watchmaking to luxury bags and, what the brand describes as, “very high-end” fragrances.
Attendees included brand ambassadors Anne Hathaway, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Liu Yifei, Shu Qi, Hikari Mori and Alessandro Gassman who all wore brand-new high jewellery pieces from the Aeterna collection. Most notably, Chopra Jonas wore the Serpenti Aeterna necklace – the most precious piece of high jewellery that Bulgari has ever created.
Featuring seven D flawless diamond drops totalling 140 carats (one for each year of the brand’s history) and 698 baguette diamonds of 61.81 carats, the jaw-dropping piece required over 2,800 hours of work to complete.
“I’m extremely proud of my creative teams led by Lucia Silvestri and Fabrizio Buonamassa Stigliani, together with our master craftsmen, for having developed the most extraordinary high-end collection ever, not only in Bulgari’s unparalleled 140 years of history, but probably overall in the 21st century,” commented Jean-Christophe Babin, CEO of Bulgari Group.
“Serpenti Aeterna represents the pinnacle of excellence. It blends the most extraordinary diamonds recently crafted together with Serpenti, the most desired jewelry and watch symbol of the last decades, brought by Cleopatra to Rome in 46 BC and reborn in 1948 thanks to the visionary Bulgari family with the jewelry secret watches.”
To showcase the new Aeterna collection, Bulgari hosted a spectacular jewellery show at the Chiostro Ludovisi, an intimate space built over the Terme’s large outdoor pool with models that included Mariacarla Boscono, Blesnya Minher, Elisabetta Dessy, Isabella Rossellini, Carla Bruni and Giacomo Cavalli.
Highlights from the new high jewellery collection include the Sapphire Aeterna Waves necklace. Designed in platinum, the incredible piece features diamonds and sapphires that evoke the wavy ocean of Sri Lanka, the country of origin of this creation’s magnificent 38.93 carats cushion-cut sapphire hung on a detachable pendant.
The collection also features the Aurea Chandra, a spherical choker that revisits Bulgari’s Chandra Line from the 1980s. Here, five rows of alternating pink gold and pavé-set diamonds wrap around the neck in a cyclical construction.
The new Monete Aeterna Augustus Emerald sautoir, meanwhile, celebrates Bulgari’s Roman heritage. Strung with a rare imperial bronze coin pendant, minted during the reign of Tiberius, that showcases the profile of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, the necklace is accented with 149 emerald beads, totalling a staggering 615.04 carats, 80 buff-top emeralds and pavé set diamonds.
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