Piranesi
1845

The house of Piranesi was founded in Milan in 1845 by Abraham Hajibay — a successful jeweller who had built his expertise among the gem markets of the Orient and arrived in Italy carrying something rare: an instinctive understanding of rough stones, diamond mines, and the ancient cutting traditions of the East, combined with the ambition to work within the Italian Renaissance tradition of goldsmithing. The fusion of those two inheritances — Oriental gemology and Italian artistry — became the house’s defining character. Milan gave him the craft. He brought the stones.

The family tradition passed through generations, eventually reaching Sami, whose own extensive travels — across diamond mines, pearl markets, estate auctions in Europe, and gem cutters’ workshops around the world — deepened the house’s knowledge and refined its eye. In 1976 the brand established its New York presence, positioning itself as the bridge between Old World European craft and the American collector’s appetite for colour and opulence. The Fiore Collection — four-petal flowers in pavé coloured sapphires, the brand’s most iconic design — and the Dome Collection, with its bold hemisphere forms in graduated sapphire hues, are the clearest expressions of what Piranesi does: classical architecture given to colour, at the highest level of handcraft.

Among the house’s most extraordinary chapters: a collaboration with Elizabeth Taylor, who worked closely with the Piranesi family to transform her jewellery visions into pieces. That archive remains in the house’s possession, available only to the most devoted collectors. Today the brand is carried forward by Sami’s wife and children, the craft and the knowledge intact across nearly two centuries.