The Vicenza Jewellery Museum opens its halls to precious marine items. Until the 1st July 2015, it will be holding the exhibition Sea Jewels, Corals, Cameos, Pearls between Memory and Innovation, organized by Assocoral in collaboration with Fiera di Vicenza and curated by Cristina Del Mare. Along a suggestive tradition and innovation path, the exhibition presents over 100 jewels : sets, necklaces, bracelets, brooches and cameos, extracted from the rarest, most prestigious materials found in the sea and transformed into splendid jewels by companies in Torre del Greco, some founded over a hundred years old. A project valorising the productive skills of Italy’s main district working corals, cameos and pearls and one of the best known in the world.
The Sea Jewels exhibition is divided into three sections presenting visitors with jewels of considerable aesthetic and strong symbolic value: Coral, the Mediterranean gem par excellence, considered that absolute magic material since the very birth of humanity, transferring its beneficial influences to man; Cameos, from the precious glyptics art, expression of the cultural identity of Torre del Greco, interest that extended to all European courts in the 18th and 19th centuries; Pearls, gems that have fascinated men of all eras, from East to West, associated with rarity, riches and power.
Corrado Facco, General Manager of the Fiera di Vicenza, declares: «The “Sea Jewels” exhibition is a true journey through Italian art, manufacturing and culture, expressing the Jewellery Museum’s basic philosophy through precious sea jewels. Thanks to this first temporary exhibition, the Museum is starting to live events integrated with the jewellery Exhibition, inaugurated in December. This Exhibition stresses the Museum’s innovative, dynamic concept: not a celebration space, but evoking a wider jewellery spectrum. How Fiera di Vicenza strengthens its ability to create value and offer itself as an innovative example of that interconnection between business, fashion and culture».
Jacopo Bulgarini d’Elci, Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Growth with Vicenza Municipality, «The Jewellery Museum is one of the results of the high levels of collaboration between town and Fiera: strategic collaboration for a new season of territorial growth built on creativity, culture, quality, the search for beauty and valorising what makes Italy truly unique. Set in the reborn Basilica, heart of the town’s renewed cultural policies, the museum is turning into a stable attraction and proof of the strength of that bond between public and private».
Alba Cappellieri, Director of the Jewellery Museum, points out: «The Jewellery Museum is delighted to host this Sea Jewels exhibition as it truly sums up that jewel pluralism that the Museum is a mouthpiece for. Corals, cameos and pearls are, at one and the same time, some of nature’s most exclusive gifts and expression of man’s best manufacturing quality. They also have a strong symbolic value; they are amulets and represent the vocation of a territory like Torre del Greco. The exhibition presents splendid historical jewels which, together with modern examples, delineate Italian beauty, quality and excellence».
Tommaso Mazza, President of Assocoral, declares: «The quality and typicality of Torre del Greco creations, applied to coral and cameos, help present the excellence of Italian gold-working. The “I Gioielli del Mare” exhibition highlights this exceptional excellence by evoking that correct balance between art, craftsmanship and fashion; it is receiving growing international acclaim, yesterday at Vicenzaoro, today in the first Italian museum dedicated to jewellery, in Japan and soon Hong Kong. It is a great satisfaction for us red gold craftsmen to be able to exhibit and display our work to a heterogeneous public of fans ».
Cristina Del Mare, Exhibition curator, stresses: «Sea jewels have always exercised magnetic attraction on collective imagination, connected to symbolic aspects, intangible , aesthetic, cultural and anthropological values, going well beyond their tangible precious, rare material connotation. The Exhibition presents sea jewels from both past and present and will take people into an exciting specular story; playing on references, combinations and parallelisms between memory and contemporaneity. Item memories, footprints coursing through time, creating other realities and other visions. A new creativity paradigm».
Sea Jewels. Corals, Cameos, Pearls between Memory and Innovation is the first temporary Exhibition to be held in the versatile ground floor hall of the Jewellery Museum, since the permanent 410 square metre museum space, situated on two floors in the Basilica Palladiana, was opened to the public last December. The Museum, the first of its kind in Italy and one of the few in the world dedicated solely to jewellery, is a Fiera di Vicenza project; set up in partnership with Vicenza Municipality, to promote the cultural gold-making and jewellery universe, sectors in which the Company is an acknowledged global Business and Cultural Hub with VICENZAORO.
In innovative settings designed by the international designer, Patricia Urquiola, the Jewellery Museum offers an original, heterogeneous aesthetic and cognitive experience of an ancient item deeply rooted in human culture. The upper floor, heart of the Museum, has nine specific theme rooms, curated by international experts, holding about 400 jewels and accompanying visitors along a new route, in both time and cultures, from prehistoric times to the future: Symbol, Magic, Function, Beauty, Art, Fashion, Design, Icon and Future.
