The Museo del Gioiello is a permanent museum exclusively dedicated to jewelry, located in Vicenza, Italy.
Visitors are invited to discover and explore the different facets of jewelry through the eyes of international experts in nine thematic rooms and temporary exhibitions.
The museum, directed and curated by Italy’s renowned jewelry expert Alba Cappellieri, professor of Jewellery Design at the Polytechnic of Milan, opened in 2014 and occupies a space of 410m2 inside the iconic Palladian Basilica.
The project honors Vicenza’s heritage as a historic jewelry center, featuring nine permanent rooms, each curated by notable international jewelry experts, and a room dedicated to temporary exhibitions. Visitors can expect a journey in time and culture, from prehistoric times to the future of jewelry.
The permanent exhibition displays a collection of 400 jewels from some of the most renowned jewelry and fashion houses in the world.
The museum aims to retrace the complex semantics of jewelry through heterogeneous points of view based on the different experiences of the distinguished panel of curators, providing a unique and carefully articulated experience.
Each of the nine rooms has a different theme, covering different perspectives, times, functions, and concepts: “Symbol,” by Stefano Papi; “Magic,” by Maura Picciau and Paolo Maria Guarrera; “Function,” by Bianca Capello; “Beauty,” by Franco Cologni; “Art,” by Graziella Folchini Grassetto; “Fashion,” by Deanna Farneti Cera; “Design,” by Gijs Bakker; “Icons,” by Alfonsina Russo and Ida Caruso; and “Future,” by Aldo Bakker.
According to Alba Cappellieri, “The Museo del Gioiello is the first Italian museum and one of the few in the world exclusively dedicated to the jewel.”
The decision to structure the museum “according to the different contexts that characterize the jewel” instead of “by style and timeline, as usual,” was made because “the jewel is a frontier object that crosses very different and often far away territories and disciplines.”
The Museum’s director explains that the nine rooms cover “from the Etruscan icons of the fifth century BC to the 3D printed jewelry of the future; from crowns to bijoux; from functional jewelry to sculpture.”
The “Museo del Gioiello” opens from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10 am to 6 pm.
