An emperor's jewel - The making of the Bulgari Hotel Roma

Bulgari was founded in Rome about 140 years ago.

Sotirios Bulgari decided to move here

to begin his profession as a jeweler.

When Sotirios arrived in Rome as a Greek immigrant,

he had an excellent mastery of the craft but very little means.

He started as a small-scale, humble craftsman in Via Sistina.

He immediately understood that it was an inclusive city,

a city of synthesis,

and his art is completely inspired

by the most remarkable symbols of this city.

All these symbols became for him and then his goldsmiths

a daily source of inspiration that gave life to a kind of jewelry

that was different from everything else at the time,

which was mainly of French origin.

For Bulgari, opening a hotel in Rome is probably the greatest project ever,

so the anticipation around the hotel is extremely high.

The emotional experience of hospitality provided by this hotel

needs to be the most amazing in the world.

We are jewelers, so we can only strive for excellence.

That means that we need to translate our art and mastery as jewelers

into every handcrafted detail of this hotel.

To make an extraordinary jewel, a unique piece,

you need to start from a unique and rare stone,

and for us the place, the building, the location of the hotel

is the stone from which everything starts.

And if that stone is not extraordinary,

then the final result could never be extraordinary.

One day, an opportunity came up.

A very central location,

just a short walk from Piazza di Spagna

and our historic boutique in Via dei Condotti.

A great view of this large and airy square,

right in the city center.

The occasion of the restoration of Emperor Augustus' mausoleum,

so the reopening of both the mausoleum and the square.

That means that Rome,

the people from Rome, and the whole world will witness

the rebirth, like a phoenix,

of an entire square right in the city center.

The moment we clumsily managed to go up to the rooftop,

we realized that we were dealing with something out of the ordinary.

You get a 360 view of Rome right from its epicenter.

In a world where, unfortunately,

almost everything around us

is designed by computers and made by robots,

to build something designed and made by real people,

thus including all the necessary imperfections,

with centuries-old techniques,

not to be nostalgic,

but simply to create places full of humanity...

The Bulgari Hotel in Rome was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

to bring together

Italy's finest creations in terms of craftsmanship.

As far as handlooms are concerned, let's start with the Jacquard machine.

It works just like a music box.

Just like a music box rotates, the Jacquard machine also rotates.

The music box plays a symphony, a melody.

Our melody is played by the wires going up and down.

Venice is a city of merchants,

the birthplace of all the businesses that revolve around luxury.

Silk was one of the main products,

especially during the 15th and 16th centuries,

when every European court

was longing to have Venetian products.

We start right there,

and we're still using those same looms in our weaving process,

so we're making velvet in the same way it was made in the past.

Hand weaving means producing around 50cm per day.

With an automatic loom, it only takes five minutes to get to 50cm.

When I was contacted for the Bulgari Hotel Roma,

it was a matter of bringing together several difficult and different elements.

The Venetian tradition, the Roman tradition,

and the Bulgari experience.

I particularly enjoyed

starting from the decorative pattern of the floor of the Pantheon

and transforming it into a sort of antique soprarizzo.

The suite is entirely covered with our fabrics,

whose pattern comes from a very precious item,

a Bulgari compact from the 1930s.

An exclusive fabric for the dining room, too.

We created these embroidered embossed reliefs

that represent these gorgeous zodiac signs.

I believe it is an outstanding idea we should be proud of.

The history of this company began more than 700 years ago.

Originally, the furnaces were located on the island of Venice,

but then the Serenissima decided to move the furnaces

from the main island to a smaller island, Murano.

By enclosing all these companies,

they could protect the secrets of glassmaking.

My story begins here when I was a teenager

because it's a family tradition,

with my father and my grandfather before him.

I went through all the learning stages one by one,

gradually building the experience that eventually made me become a master.

Good dexterity is essential,

glass is a very complex material.

Each procedure is unique, you must never repeat the same process.

It may be a paradox, but you need to be quite flexible

because you need to adapt to the glass, not the other way around.

We were asked to create two large light installations.

We worked on 25 blown glass pieces,

each one containing our famous gold foil.

That gives the glass a light effect that reflects the thousand golden specks,

making it look like a jewel.

The Bulgari Roma project actually started 20 years ago

with the selection of this location, which is absolutely perfect.

The Morpurgo building,

designed during the 1930s,

is the Bulgari Hotel.

It's like it was always meant to be.

The project had to be clear.

It couldn't be a philological restoration

of a project from the 1930s.

The inspiration behind the project

definitely comes from the ghost of the emperor.

Augustus began to build the mausoleum

as soon as he went back to Rome after his victories in the Middle East.

Its circular shape

and some details of the Morpurgo building

guided us through the basic elements of the project.

The use of marble, which is very present and bold,

but also the deployment of precious materials.

How can you create an idea of history of a hotel

that could become a sort of grand hotel in people's collective memory,

if you haven't created something that can stand the test of time?

There's a great search for materials

which also comes from the vision of Augustus' Rome.

As written in his biographies,

he was able to go from a Rome made of wood and terracotta,

to a Rome made of marble and stone.

"Inveni urbem roman lateres, revertor ad marmoris."

"I found Rome a city of bricks, I left it a city of marble."

This famous quote

Suetonius attributed to Octavian Augustus implies a very deep meaning.

Decorating Rome's public buildings and temples

with colored marble from all the provinces of the Empire

was an intentional political communication strategy by Augustus,

That's how Augustus laid the foundations of the concept of citizenship.

The hardest thing was finding types of marble

that were as close as possible to those used in ancient Rome.

We started with an in-depth study on archaeological marbles

thanks to the book by Raniero Gnoli, "Marmora Romana"

and the Santarelli Foundation's collection of ancient marbles.

The colored marbles decorating the hotel are a tribute to Rome's deepest identity,

but also a tribute to the color of the gemstones

that have made the Bulgari jewels stand out all over the world.

We selected the best

and brought it here to Rome, to our hotel.

Piazza Augusto Imperatore is a unique and incredible location,

between the Tiber and the ancient Via Flaminia.

Augustus wanted it to be the center of his mausoleum,

inspired by the tomb of Alexander the Great,

which he saw when he conquered Egypt,

and by the mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders.

It incorporates a reinterpretation of the greatest places of ancient times,

which in turn had to celebrate the first great emperor.

This incredible, unique place

was then subjected to further phases and stratification.

A large Renaissance and Baroque garden.

Then the auditorium after the unification of Italy.

Then the neoclassical and rationalist rearrangements.

Restoring Piazza Augusto Imperatore, making it accessible,

and enhancing its unique stratification of history, art, culture, and architecture

is a great honor for us,

a legacy we want to leave not only to the city but to the world

because this is a World Heritage Site.

The Torlonia collection is the most important

private ancient Greek and Roman art collection in the world.

It's an exceptional body of works collected by the family over the centuries

through both acquisitions of important Roman patrician collections

and a series of excavations on the estates of the Torlonia family.

Our laboratories were created to study and restore

the over 600 works belonging to the Torlonia collection,

to get them through an enhancement process.

Thanks to the study and restoration work carried out by the Torlonia Foundation

with the contribution of Bulgari,

these wonderful statues can be installed in a new exhibition space,

a place where they can be seen and enjoyed by everybody.

The project was created, together with the Torlonia Foundation,

to host one statue per year in the foyer.

In this incredible collection spanning over four centuries of Empire,

which means dozens of emperors,

there's one man who's much more important than the others,

because if it hadn't been for him, all this marble wouldn't be here today.

The first Roman emperor, Augustus.

The feeling I had the first time I saw the statue of Augustus

was definitely a sense of privilege,

but also great responsibility.

We started by cleaning it.

The cleaning step allowed us

to make the graphic documentation more accurate,

especially the inserts,

so the parts that, during previous restorations,

were added because something had gone missing.

Art conservators must not create anything.

They must cancel themselves

and speak after they understand the work.

Unfortunately, that also means canceling the artistic quality of the conservator,

whose presence is imperative, though,

because only a person with a lot of experience in the art world