Cinemagia is the high jewellery collection presented by Bulgari in 2019, conceived as a sustained meditation on the house's deep and well-documented entanglement with Italian cinema and the culture of la dolce vita. Comprising one-of-a-kind and limited pieces set with exceptional coloured gemstones — among them Kashmir and Ceylon sapphires, Colombian and Zambian emeralds, Burmese rubies, and fancy-colour diamonds — the collection drew its visual and emotional grammar from the golden age of Cinecittà, Rome's legendary studio complex, and from the personal histories of actresses who had worn Bulgari jewels on and off the screen. As a body of work, Cinemagia sits within a tradition of Bulgari high jewellery collections that treat gemstones not merely as luxury commodities but as narrative objects, their colour and rarity made to carry specific cultural weight.

Bulgari and Cinema: A Historical Foundation

The relationship between Bulgari and the world of film is not a retrospective marketing construction but a matter of historical record stretching back to the 1950s and 1960s, when Rome functioned as a production hub for both Italian and American cinema. The phenomenon sometimes called Hollywood on the Tiber brought major international productions — and their stars — to Cinecittà and to the city's streets and hotels. Bulgari's Via Condotti boutique, opened in 1905 and by mid-century already established as one of the foremost jewellery destinations in Europe, became a habitual port of call for visiting actresses and directors.

Elizabeth Taylor is the figure most persistently associated with this chapter of the house's history. During the protracted Rome shoot of Cleopatra (1963), Taylor visited the Via Condotti boutique repeatedly, and the jewels she acquired there — including emerald and diamond parures and a celebrated emerald pendant necklace — entered both her personal collection and the broader iconography of mid-century glamour. Taylor herself is reported to have described Bulgari as the only Italian word she needed to know, a remark that has been cited in numerous documented accounts of the period. Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, and Anna Magnani were among the other actresses whose association with the house was sufficiently well attested to form part of the institutional memory that Cinemagia explicitly invoked.

Cinecittà, founded in 1937 and rebuilt after wartime damage to become the largest film studio complex in Europe, provided the collection's architectural and atmospheric backdrop. The studio's association with Federico Fellini — whose La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8½ (1963) defined a particular Roman aesthetic of opulent, slightly surreal beauty — gave the collection a further layer of cultural reference that Bulgari's creative direction made explicit in its presentation materials and editorial imagery.

Gemstones: Selection and Significance

High jewellery collections at the level of Cinemagia are distinguished from standard luxury production by the primacy of the gemstone in the design process: stones of exceptional quality, rarity, or provenance are sourced first, and the jewel is constructed around them rather than the reverse. This approach, long practised by the great Parisian and Roman houses, is particularly evident in Bulgari's handling of coloured stones, where the house has historically favoured bold, saturated colour and large calibrated cuts over the more restrained palette associated with certain northern European traditions.

The sapphires featured in Cinemagia included examples from Kashmir — the benchmark origin for velvety, cornflower-blue colour in the trade — as well as stones of Sri Lankan and Burmese provenance. Kashmir sapphires, mined from a remote Himalayan deposit at approximately 4,500 metres elevation and commercially exhausted by the early twentieth century, command significant premiums at auction and in private treaty sales when accompanied by laboratory certificates confirming origin; the presence of such stones in a high jewellery collection of this kind signals both the house's access to the upper tier of the coloured-stone market and its willingness to commit substantial resources to a single piece.

Emeralds in the collection reflected Bulgari's long-standing preference for Colombian material, particularly stones from the Muzo and Chivor mines, whose warm, slightly yellowish green is considered by many in the trade to represent the finest expression of the species. The house has historically been less conservative than some of its peers in its acceptance of emeralds with visible inclusions — the jardin of natural fractures and growth features that is characteristic of the species — provided that colour and transparency are of sufficient quality. Zambian emeralds, whose cooler, more bluish green has gained considerable market acceptance since the 1970s, also featured in the collection.

Ruby, the gemstone most closely associated with Bulgari's mid-century aesthetic and with the bold colour combinations that characterise the house's design language, appeared in several Cinemagia pieces. Burmese rubies of unheated status — confirmed by laboratory analysis showing no evidence of heat treatment — represent the most commercially significant category within the species, and their presence in a high jewellery collection is typically noted explicitly in accompanying documentation. The house's use of ruby alongside emerald and sapphire in single compositions, a chromatic boldness that has been a Bulgari signature since at least the 1960s, was maintained throughout the collection.

Fancy-colour diamonds, including yellow and pink examples, provided both tonal contrast and the kind of rarity that anchors the highest-value pieces in any high jewellery collection. The grading of fancy-colour diamonds by laboratories such as the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) — which assigns colour grades on a scale from Faint through Fancy Deep — has made it possible to communicate the quality of such stones with precision in auction and retail contexts, and pieces from collections of this kind are typically accompanied by full laboratory reports.

Design Language and Aesthetic Programme

Bulgari's design identity has always been understood in contrast to the French tradition: where the great Parisian houses of the early twentieth century developed a vocabulary rooted in geometric abstraction and the subordination of the stone to the mount, Bulgari — working from a Roman goldsmithing tradition and with a different relationship to colour and volume — tended towards larger stones, more saturated palettes, and a certain theatrical confidence in the combination of hues that might elsewhere be considered discordant. This sensibility, sometimes described in the trade as Bulgari colour, is the aesthetic foundation on which Cinemagia was built.

The collection's specific references to cinema manifested in several ways: in the use of dramatic, high-contrast colour combinations that evoke the saturated palette of Technicolor film stock; in the scale and presence of individual pieces, which are conceived to be worn and seen at a distance as well as examined close up; and in the explicit invocation of specific films and actresses in the naming and presentation of individual jewels. The house's creative direction under Lucia Silvestri, who has served as Bulgari's creative director for gemstones for several decades and whose personal involvement in stone selection is well documented, gave the collection a coherence that distinguishes it from more diffuse high jewellery presentations.

Technically, the pieces in Cinemagia demonstrate the full range of Bulgari's goldsmithing capabilities: pavé settings in both yellow and white gold, cabochon-cut stones in bezel settings that recall the house's 1960s and 1970s work, and the elaborate mixed-metal constructions that have characterised its high jewellery since the 1990s. The use of yellow gold — which Bulgari maintained as a primary metal through periods when white gold and platinum dominated the broader market — is particularly significant in the context of a collection evoking the warm, sun-drenched aesthetic of mid-century Roman cinema.

Context Within Bulgari's High Jewellery Programme

Cinemagia was presented in 2019 as part of Bulgari's annual high jewellery collection cycle, which the house has maintained with increasing ambition since its acquisition by LVMH in 2011. The collection was unveiled in Rome — specifically in settings associated with the city's cinematic heritage — rather than at the Paris or Geneva venues more commonly used for high jewellery presentations, a choice that underscored the collection's identity as a specifically Roman cultural statement.

Within the broader sequence of Bulgari high jewellery collections, Cinemagia occupies a position alongside other thematically coherent bodies of work that the house has produced in the same period, including collections drawing on Mediterranean archaeology, the natural world, and the history of Roman decorative arts. The consistent thread across these collections is the primacy of exceptional gemstones and the house's willingness to build narratives of cultural and historical significance around them — an approach that distinguishes Bulgari's high jewellery programme from purely aesthetic or technical exercises.

The commercial context for a collection of this kind involves a small number of very high-value transactions, typically conducted privately or through the house's dedicated high jewellery clientele rather than through standard retail channels. Pieces from Cinemagia and comparable Bulgari high jewellery collections have subsequently appeared at major auction houses, where they are catalogued with full provenance and laboratory documentation, and where they have generally performed strongly relative to comparable unsigned pieces, reflecting the premium that the market attaches to named-house high jewellery of this period.

The Elizabeth Taylor Legacy

No account of Cinemagia is complete without a more extended consideration of the Elizabeth Taylor connection, which is not merely biographical colour but a substantive part of the collection's meaning. Taylor's Bulgari jewels — many of which were sold at Christie's Geneva and New York in the landmark 2011 auction of her estate — established price benchmarks for signed Bulgari pieces that continue to influence the market. The 1963 emerald and diamond pendant necklace, the sapphire and diamond suite acquired during the Cleopatra period, and numerous other pieces documented in photographs and in Taylor's own accounts of her collecting formed a corpus of jewels that defined, for a generation of collectors and observers, what Bulgari high jewellery meant at its most expressive.

Cinemagia engaged with this legacy not by reproducing specific historical pieces but by working in the same register of emotional and chromatic intensity — the sense that a jewel should be an event, a declaration, something commensurate with the drama of the life in which it is worn. This is, ultimately, the aesthetic argument that the collection makes: that the great coloured gemstones, properly understood and properly set, are themselves a form of cinema, capable of the same compression of feeling and the same sudden arrest of attention that characterises the best moments on screen.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — Bulgari High Jewellery coverage
• GIA — History of Bulgari and Coloured Stones