Original 1950's Mario Buccellati Ruby Diamond Yellow White Gold Heart Bracelet

A love of tradition set Mario Buccellati and his fine jewelry house apart in the competitive Italian market and remains a point of pride for the family.

In 1919, Mario launched Buccellati with the opening of his first shop in Milan and quickly built a reputation for his richly embellished traforato, or finely pierced goldwork. The Ancona, Italy–born jeweler’s workmanship was in a class of its own. His rings, earrings, bracelets and other accessories were exquisite, yet the gemstones themselves were never too flashy, elevated instead by the designs’ intricate metalsmithing.

Today the Buccellati family is still closely tied to the business even as it is now owned by Richemont, a luxury conglomerate that also counts Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels among its subsidiaries.

A young Mario Buccellati apprenticed with famed goldsmith Beltrami e Besnati in the early 1900s, although many of the goldsmithing techniques synonymous with Buccellati go as far back as the Italian Renaissance. The family lineage is also said to include 18th-century jeweler Contardo Buccellati.

Owing to the founder’s advanced metalworking skills, the brand is known for designs that feature metal with the delicacy of lace and draw on the wonders of the natural world. The house’s work is typified by intricate gemstone settings that emphasize their natural color and dense engraving techniques that transform the texture of gold.

One of the time-honored engraving techniques that has come to characterize Buccellati’s work — techniques that require apprenticeships and training in the fine jeweler’s workshops — is called rigato. It involves the engraving of a precious metal with a series of parallel lines to achieve a fabric-like effect.

Rigato is on luminous display in the house’s Macri collection of earrings, cuff bracelets and other accessories. A painstaking attention to detail is pronounced in the celebrated Macri, Bartolomeo and Unica collections — witness the striking honeycomb motif, a house signature, that characterizes the Unica collection’s Caterina bracelet, for example.

The Macri collection was the work of Mario’s son, Gianmaria Buccellati, an award-winning jeweler and internationally renowned silversmith who worked to bring the brand to the global stage by overseeing the opening of boutiques in Tokyo, Paris, California and elsewhere.

In 1951, Mario opened his first store in New York City; today the company operates boutiques worldwide. In 2019, the company celebrated its centennial with a new flagship in Paris and the Vintage collection, which features some of its most enduring designs.

On 1stDibs, find a collection of authentic Mario Buccellati jewelry today.

A FAMILY STORY, THE STORY OF A JEWELLER In 1927 Giovanni Battista Berca started creating so beautiful and so refined jewelry that his fame surpassed that of any other master goldsmith. In a short space of time he became the personal jeweler of influential families who turned to him for their small masterpieces in the tradition of classical high jewelry. Giuseppe Berca, his son, refused to rest on his father’s laurels and decided that the tradition should be updated. He transformed his workshop into a small company and put emphasis on design development creating his personal style. Following his father’s philosophy is now Marco Giovanni Berca running the company: aesthetic searches coupled with unusual choices in the material selection are the hinges that hold up his ongoing research. “Attention should be placed on the item from which our activity stems: the research and the selection of those gems that may naturally appear mysterious and strange and that, in the hands of the jeweler, transform themselves so to appear almost magical, thanks to their capacity of light, color and joy: that’s why behind each collection lies a stone: we are fascinated by a unique material, its light, its color, the luminous spark that can materialize in front of our gaze; all items that, in themselves, constitute a beginning, the beginning of a new research of forms and volumes fit to give expression to our idea of “bello” –he says.