Or: Italy’s own take on the same design conversation the rest of Europe was having
Italian mid-century design gets celebrated constantly in furniture and industrial design, Olivetti, the great postwar Milanese studios, but Italian jewellery from the same period gets talked about far less outside specialist circles. Laurana’s enamelled bangle is a useful corrective: the same postwar confidence in bold form and colour that defined Italian product design shows up here too, just applied to something worn on the wrist instead of sitting on a desk.
Where the Scandinavian pieces in this collection tend toward restraint and the natural colour of silver itself, this bangle leans into enamel’s saturated colour range, a distinctly Italian design instinct: form matters, but so does colour, and there’s no need to apologise for wanting both.
Why Italian mid-century jewellery deserves more attention than it gets. It sits in an odd gap: not old enough to be conventional antique jewellery, not famous enough as a design category to command the same collector interest as Italian furniture or glass from the same decades. That gap is exactly where genuinely good pieces can still be found without paying a premium purely for name recognition.
What to look for. The enamel should be glossy and fully intact with no hairline cracking, since enamelled pieces are always more fragile than plain metalwork, condition matters more here than with an equivalent silver-only piece.
This piece has since sold. It was part of a small, genuinely personal collection of mid-century and antique jewellery, gathered over years rather than acquired for resale. See the Laurana Italy enamel bangle on Gozotiques.