Bulgari: How a Greek Silversmith Built Rome's Greatest Jewellery Empire

In 1962, Elizabeth Taylor was filming Cleopatra at Cinecittà studios outside Rome. The production was, by most accounts, a catastrophe: overbudget, interminably delayed, the director replaced, the studio nearly bankrupted. Taylor herself was intermittently ill, distracted, and conducting a very public affair with her co-star Richard Burton. What she was also doing, whenever the production gave her a reason to be in the city rather than on set, was shopping at Bulgari on Via Condotti.

She would later say that she had learned Italian at Bulgari. This is the kind of remark that is easy to dismiss as the wit of a woman who knew how to perform wit. But Taylor spent a significant portion of three years in Rome, and the Via Condotti store was, by the early 1960s, the most interesting jewellery destination in Europe. Not the most formal — that was still Cartier, or Van Cleef in Paris — but the most alive. The pieces were bold in a way that Parisian houses were not yet bold. The colours were wrong, in the best possible sense: rubies next to emeralds, sapphires against coral, combinations that the French tradition would have considered excessive and that Taylor, who had no interest in restraint, found exactly right.

The house that produced those pieces had been in business for seventy-eight years by the time Taylor discovered it. It had been founded by a man named Sotirio Voulgaris, born in 1857 in Paramythia, in what was then the Ottoman Empire and is now northwest Greece.

In Brief: Bulgari was founded in Rome in 1884 by Greek silversmith Sotirio Voulgaris, and grew from a Via Condotti silver shop into one of the world's most recognisable jewellery houses, acquired by LVMH for €4.3 billion in 2011. Reading this gives you the full lineage: from the classical Mediterranean palette that set Bulgari apart from French rivals, to the Serpenti, the B.zero1, and the Elizabeth Taylor pieces that built the mythology.

Bulgari: Key Dates

Sotirio

Sotirio Voulgaris trained as a silversmith in Greece and then, as Greek craftsmen of his generation often did, moved west. He spent time in Corfu, then in Naples, before settling in Rome in 1884. His first shop was on Via Sistina, not far from the Spanish Steps, close enough to the tourist traffic that sustained small luxury trades in the city at that time, but not yet on the street that would define the house.

He sold Greek and Roman-influenced silverwork: pieces that drew on the decorative traditions of antiquity rather than the reigning French fashion. This was either shrewd positioning or simply what he knew how to make. Possibly both. Rome at the end of the nineteenth century had a tourist class that was specifically interested in antiquity, that had come to the city because of its ruins and was not immune to the idea of taking a piece of that history home in a form small enough to pack.

By 1905, the business had moved to Via Condotti (then as now the principal street for luxury retail in Rome) and Sotirio had Italianised his name to Bulgari. The double-B, rendered in Roman lettering as BVLGARI, came later and is a deliberate archaism: classical Latin inscriptions used V where modern Italian uses U. It is a piece of visual identity so effective that it has never needed revision.

Sotirio died in 1932. His sons Giorgio and Costantino had already taken significant roles in the business by then, and the transition was smooth. Giorgio's son, also Giorgio, would be the one to build the house into what it is today.

The Bulgari style

The thing that distinguishes Bulgari from the Parisian houses is not the quality of the stones or the craft (at the level Bulgari was operating from the mid-twentieth century onwards, these were comparable) but the use of colour. French fine jewellery in the postwar period was predominantly white: diamonds, platinum, white gold, the occasional sapphire or emerald used as punctuation in an essentially pale composition. Bulgari used colour as the subject, not the accent.

The Serpenti, the coiled snake bracelet that became one of the house's signature pieces, first appeared in the 1940s as a watch case: the movement hidden inside the serpent's head, the scales formed from flexible gold links set with pavé diamonds or coloured stones. The form was ancient; snakes had wound around the wrists of Roman and Egyptian jewellery for two thousand years. Bulgari's version was modern in its engineering and ancient in its reference, which is a reasonable description of Rome itself.

The combination of coloured stones that Taylor had found so compelling (ruby and emerald, sapphire and coral, tourmaline and turquoise) was codified in the 1960s into what became the house's characteristic palette. Where Cartier worked in the language of French luxury, Bulgari worked in the language of the Mediterranean. The reference points were the Forum, the mosaics of Ravenna, the pigments of Byzantine icons rather than the Place Vendôme.

This was not an accident. Giorgio Bulgari, the third-generation director of the house, was a serious student of classical antiquity, and the collections from the 1960s through the 1980s consistently drew on Roman and Greek decorative motifs: the coin, the cameo, the architectural detail rendered in gold and stone.

Elizabeth Taylor and the making of a mythology

Taylor bought, and was given, Bulgari throughout her relationship with Burton. He would present pieces as apologies, as celebrations, as the ordinary currency of a relationship conducted at a scale that required jewellery to bear emotional weight that ordinary people managed with words. A 1972 Bulgari necklace with a 65-carat emerald and diamond pendant is documented. So is the Bulgari watch she wore on the set of almost every film she made in the 1970s.

What Taylor did for Bulgari was establish the association between the house and a particular kind of woman: someone who wore jewellery as armour and as declaration, who treated a major piece as the completion of a thought rather than the finishing of an outfit. The Parisian houses were beloved by women who dressed. Bulgari became beloved by women who lived at a volume the Parisian aesthetic could not quite accommodate.

This is too simple as a formulation (Bulgari has always dressed women who dress), but the Taylor association gave the house something that decades of advertising could not have purchased: the image of a woman who could not be intimidated by a piece, who met it as an equal.

The modern house

By the 1980s, Bulgari had expanded beyond jewellery into watches, then into accessories, perfume, and eventually hotels. The B.zero1 ring, introduced in 1999, became a commercial anchor: a spiral ring in yellow gold, stackable, graphic, readable from across a room. It was designed for a generation that wanted the Bulgari association without necessarily the scale of the classic pieces. It worked. The B.zero1 remains one of the house's most recognised contemporary designs.

In 2011, LVMH acquired Bulgari for €4.3 billion, at the time the largest acquisition in the history of the luxury conglomerate. The Bulgari family, specifically Nicola Bulgari and his brother Paolo, received LVMH shares as part of the deal. Nicola became a vice chairman of Bulgari and has remained involved with the house.

The acquisition ended the Bulgari family's direct ownership but not, it seems, the family's character in the brand. Under LVMH, Bulgari has continued to expand its hotel portfolio — Rome, Milan, London, Paris, Dubai, Tokyo — and its high jewellery collections have, if anything, become more ambitious. The Magnifica collection, presented in 2021, included a 131-carat emerald that was one of the most significant stones to appear in a new collection in a generation.

What LVMH bought, and what it has largely preserved, is a house with a specific identity: Mediterranean, chromatic, architectural, slightly defiant of the conventions of French luxury. Whether that identity survives another generation of corporate ownership is a question that applies to every family-founded luxury house now in conglomerate hands. Bulgari's answer, so far, is probably the most optimistic of the group.

Via Condotti

The original Via Condotti store (expanded, renovated, but on the same street and within the same block as Sotirio's 1905 shop) is still the house's Roman flagship. The street has changed considerably: it is now lined with every major luxury brand, as Via Condotti became, over the postwar decades, the template for the luxury shopping streets that followed in every major city.

Bulgari was there before most of them. The cameo of the shop in Roman Holiday, in La Dolce Vita and in the documented shopping habits of the international set that passed through Rome in the 1950s and 1960s is not the result of marketing strategy. It is simply the record of where those people went when they were in that city.

Taylor's Italian, learned at Bulgari or elsewhere, was reportedly serviceable by the end of the Cleopatra shoot. What she retained rather longer were the pieces.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Bulgari?

Bulgari was founded by Sotirio Voulgaris, a Greek silversmith born in Paramythia in 1857. He opened his first shop in Rome in 1884 on Via Sistina and moved to Via Condotti in 1905. He Italianised his name to Bulgari on settling in Rome.

Why is Bulgari spelled BVLGARI?

The BVLGARI spelling uses classical Latin lettering, in which V was used where modern Italian and English use U. The rendering is a deliberate reference to Roman antiquity and forms one of the house's most recognisable visual identifiers.

Who owns Bulgari now, and how much did LVMH pay?

Bulgari has been owned by LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) since 2011, when the French luxury conglomerate acquired the house for €4.3 billion. The Bulgari family received LVMH shares as part of the transaction and Nicola Bulgari became a vice chairman of the brand.

What is Bulgari known for in high jewellery?

Bulgari is known for its use of bold, saturated colour in high jewellery (combining gemstones in ways that differ from the predominantly white aesthetic of French fine jewellery) and for its Serpenti and B.zero1 designs. The house is also known for its hotel group, which operates properties in Rome, Milan, London, Dubai, and Tokyo, among others.

What is the Bulgari Serpenti design and when was it introduced?

The Serpenti is a coiled serpent design first introduced by Bulgari in the 1940s as a flexible watch bracelet, with the watch movement housed in the snake's head. The design has expanded to include rings, earrings, and handbags. The snake form references ancient Roman and Egyptian jewellery, in which serpent motifs were associated with protection and continuity.

What was Elizabeth Taylor's connection to Bulgari?

Elizabeth Taylor became closely associated with Bulgari during the filming of Cleopatra in Rome between 1961 and 1963, during which she visited the Via Condotti store frequently. Richard Burton gave her numerous Bulgari pieces throughout their relationship. Taylor later said she had learned Italian at Bulgari, a remark that is documented to the satisfaction of most people who have repeated it since.

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Sources: Bulgari official archive documentation; Penny Proddow and Marion Fasel, Bulgari (Assouline, 2003); Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (context for Taylor in Rome); LVMH acquisition press documentation, March 2011; Nicola Bulgari oral history interviews, various.