Fiore d'Inverno silver ring with blue topaz and blue enamel inside the corolla

How it is made

The words of the trade, one by one, explained to those who do not know them.

01

Corolla from a single sheet

The corolla is not an assembly of petals: it is a single sheet, hollowed into a shallow cup and left irregular at the rim, with the folds running out from the center. The wavy rim is not corrected twice — silver once stretched does not come back — so the first fold is the one that stays. In the middle of the cup is the one point that has to stay flat: it is the seat of the stone, and if the cup has moved there the setting will not sit.

02

Enamel

Enamel is glass: ground to a powder, laid on the metal and taken to several hundred degrees until it melts and becomes one surface with the piece. Before the fire it is wet powder that a breath will move; afterwards it cannot be retouched, because correcting one point means putting all the color already fired back into the fire, and at every pass you risk a bubble, a cooling crack and the color turning. The families have names of their own and are told apart by how the metal holds the color: champlevé, when the color sits in recesses cut into the sheet; cloisonné, when it sits inside little walls of wire soldered to the ground; cold enamel, when instead of glass there is a resin that hardens without fire. They are different techniques, and they are not attributed by eye.

03

Blue topaz

Topaz is an aluminum silicate, and in nature it is almost always colorless. The blue seen in jewelry almost always comes from a treatment: the colorless rough is irradiated and then heated, and the color that comes out is stable and does not fade. Naturally occurring blue topaz exists, but it is rare and usually very pale — on a saturated blue stone the treatment is therefore the rule and not the exception, and it is a declared and accepted practice in the gem trade. For whoever sets it, something else matters: topaz cleaves along a clean plane, parallel to the base. A knock in the wrong direction does not chip a corner, it opens the stone in two — which is why it is held on claws that take it round the outline and leave it free, and why a setting is never tapped down again on a topaz already in place.