Roma source of Inspiration

You may travel to Roma today and listen to a handful of bench jewelers recall glorious stories of life, working at Petochi. Many started as young apprentices and spent their entire careers with Petochi. It was also not uncommon in the early days for bench jewelers to begin their apprentice training after attaining only a 5th grade education; the feeling was that learning a craft that requires such nimble and hand-eye coordination was optimized at about age 11 or 12. The youngsters studied the discipline, and Petochi gave them years of work, handcrafting things they were proud to create. Alberto Petochi remembers visiting the store at age four, but spending all his time in the workshop. “It was like a big, extended family,” he recalls. “They ate together, took coffee breaks together, shared stories and worked together as a family. In fact, they were an integral part of the Petochi family. They taught me to work on brass, to learn how to saw, file, and melt down metals.”

The Bocca della Verità is a must-see ancient monument in Rome tied to Italy's golden age of Roman Holiday. Thank You Darius Arya for exploring with us Rome's ancient past and its continued artistic legacy, meeting up with our master artisan Dante Mortet in the heart of historic Rome. As we share Petochi’s ongoing family collaboration in the creation of a new Bocca della Verita' mirroring the achievements of ancient Rome made by hand with antique techniques