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There are people in Bologna, who have a remarked propention to recovery and conservation of vintage objects. One of them is Annarita Vitali, who produces jewels, rings, pins, bracelets, earrings, necklaces, bags and other accessories in her atelier, thanks to the use of vintage floral-themed materials recovered in markets and antique shops.

She has a degree in city planning with the architect Cervellati, who has always been active in the recovery of historical city centres, after the collaboration with “Ente Manifestazioni artistiche” and the gallery of modern art, Annarita decided to dedicate herself to jewel-making and developed an activity of recovery.
Everything began with the purchase of “Furlanetto” storehouse. It had been founded in 1925 and it has been taken over in 1998 by her with all its ancient materials. From that year, it started living again thanks to her creations.
The business, which had been founded by Romeo Furlanetto in 1925, used to produce accessories for the fashion industry, which were sold in international markets, and because of this collaborated with important stylists like Valentino, Chanel and Balenciaga of whom Furlanetto was the Italian supplier.
After the premature death of Romeo Furlanetto, his wife Maria took over the business, she was a Calestani of Casalmaggiore.
The most antique and important jewel-production had its headquarters here and its jewels were named ‘oro matto’, because they were not complete valuables, starting from the second half of the 19^th century.
As a matter of fact, gold-plated jewels were invented here and had an enormous success all over the world.
The industries producing accessories syndicated and kept on producing till the seventies.
It would have all been lost, if the bijoux museum had not been invented in 1998. It tells the story of the evolution of bijoux through more than 30,000 pieces.
After two years of cataloguing materials, Annarita Vitali started producing unique pieces with antique materials in 1998, which had been bought from Bologna’s Furlanetto industry, which closed in the same year.
Nowadays, unique and themed jewels are created by hand and with antique materials in a small villa in the early twentieth century style.
Recurrent themes emerge in the jewels, because of the materials used and their historicization, like in other artistic fields such as architecture, poetry, painting, literature, and this is the consequence of a throughout anthropologic and social analysis, which reveals the reasons behind tendencies… for example shells, first ornamentation of human beings, which emerge cyclically, or naturalistic themes (flowers like violets, daisies, roses) and heraldry.

THE MATERIALS

Furlanetto business used hundreds of cardboards exhibitors in 1920, in order to show the materials employed in the production.
They were numerous and various: many glass pastes from Venice, a lume pearls, pearls with gold and silver leaves, murrina, and flowery pearls; centrifuged resins whose manufacturing was declared illegal because of the flammability of the dusts used by Max Mayer in the fifties, but they kept on using them for the Japanese collection, because of the precision of details; galaliths derived from milk proteins, backed, softened in cold water, put in moulds and polished by hand, whose beauty consists of its transparent, shining and non-uniform colours; the first flowery plastics of the sixties which had a great success in that period, thanks to the benefits and joy that they brought. In addition, jet of various natures, which were probably left in some storehouse, because of their spreading in the 19^th century, like the pearls used in Eastern and Western Africa in order to make exchanges and obtain raw materials like gold. Then, lead crystals with non-industrial faceting, firepolish beads and hardware from Paris’s Framex industry, which has kept on producing since the beginning of the 19^th century.

This post is also available in: Italiano (Italian)