Vintage Bvlgari Serpenti Sapphire, Diamond and Malachite Bangle in Rose Gold

Bulgari’s classic serpent first reared its head in the late 1940s. Bulgari founder Sotirios Voulgaris’s sons, Giorgio and Constantino, took over the Italian fine-jewelry house when their father passed away in 1932, and the brothers conceived the motif for a series of wristwatches — a nod to snakes’ mythological association with the beginning and the end of time — which became the basis for an entire line of jewels. The design was immediately popular among Bulgari aficionados, but its star turn came in 1962, when it graced one very famous wrist.

That year, Elizabeth Taylor was in Rome shooting Cleopatra alongside her future husband, Richard Burton. In a publicity photo released from the set, the actress can be seen with a gold cuff coiled around her wrist, ending in a pavé diamond snake head — a Bulgari Serpenti bracelet. Taylor’s relationship with the jewelry house ran deep: she and Burton allegedly used the back doors of its flagship store in Rome to escape the paparazzi during their much-buzzed-about affair. “The only word Elizabeth knows in Italian is Bulgari,” Burton famously said. 

Taylor’s stamp of approval catapulted the Serpenti to international fame, and the jewelry house began experimenting with variations on the motif, setting jewels along the cuff or on the head. In still another version, dozens of individual enameled scales are painstakingly attached to a central core.

The snake’s myriad meanings across cultures no doubt contribute to the Serpenti design’s allure. In some cultures, it connotes evil, in others fertility. In Voulgaris’s native Greece, the coiled serpent symbolizes everlasting life. 

Greek silversmith Sotirios Voulgaris arrived in Rome in 1881 and set up his own shop there in 1884, calling it Bulgari, an Italianization of his last name (eventually spelled BVLGARI, using the classical Latin alphabet in a nod to ancient Roman culture). In 1905, he opened the company’s flagship boutique on Rome’s Via dei Condotti.

Although the house found success with its silverwork and Art Deco designs, popular through the 1920s, its signature style — bold, often using yellow gold embellished with big colorful gemstones — began to emerge when Sotirios’s sons inherited the business, in 1932. The brand truly hit its stride in the dolce vita era of the 1950s and ’60s, when the founder’s grandsons Paolo, Gianni and Nicola Bulgari decisively departed from demure traditional styles to develop the house’s exuberant multi-gem looks, attracting celebrity collectors like Elizabeth Taylor.

In the 1940s, Bulgari debuted perhaps its most famous design, the Serpenti bracelet watch. The piece’s snakelike coils were made possible by the tubogas jewelry technique, which links a flexible series of thin horizontal bands. Both the sleek, modern tubogas construction and the sinuous snake motif continue to be synonymous with the Bulgari brand.