Il maestro necklace

The name is Alighieri. It is inspired by Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet, who was writing in the 12th and 13th century in Florence. And to give you a bit of back story of how I got there, I studied French and Italian in University and spent time living in Florence. I just fell in love with Dante’s story [The Divine Comedy]. This idea of a man lost in the dark woods, in love with a woman he can’t have, in political exile. And after I graduated from university, I kept going back to his work. And that’s when I decided I wanted to start telling stories and translating stories into objects. So I named the brand Alighieri.

It is a really good question. I guess, ever since I was a kid, I always loved collecting objects. I lived in Africa when I was a child and I used to forage for objects quite a lot. I would collect stones and things, I would find, that were imperfect and they kind of became talisman. So ever since I was young, I always would believe in this idea that things we find on our journey remind us of some place and bring us strength as we move forward.

Indeed. And then as I kept reading the Divine Comedy, I found it really interesting how every culture uses jewellery as a way of finding strength and passing on the narratives through generations. And I love the universality of that. And for me, that went hand in hand with poetry. Universal sentiments of love and loss and fear and courage. And I think we live in, sadly, a quite divided world, there’s a lot of conflict and ideology and different religions and cultures believing in different things, and I found it quite amazing that jewellery is completely universal. Genuinely, you can believe in a god or not believe in a god, be religious or non-religious, but these objects say something. I love the idea of universality through objects and I also don’t see that as any different to poetry.