About Picchiotti

Learn About the brand

Giuseppe Picchiotti was born in Valenza, a quiet town enveloped in the lush and fragrant vine-covered hills of Piedmont and renowned for its meticulous handcraftsmanship of precious gem-set jewelry, into a family of pharmacists, one of the few original Valenza families to remain in the town today. It was always expected he would follow the family path and study pharmacology at university. Looking back today, however, Giuseppe recalls that his lack of enthusiasm and aptitude for the family profession disappointed his father. Hard as it is to imagine, he was, he says, the black sheep of the family. Realizing his young son’s reluctance, Giuseppe’s father asked the director of the renowned Valenza jewelry school, a close friend, and a jewelry designer himself, if his son could work in his atelier during his summer holidays, perhaps hoping his son would be dissuaded from jewelry-making and return to the family fold as a medical professional. From the age of just 13, and for three consecutive years, Giuseppe spent long, hot summer days in the workshop, helping, watching, practicing, learning his craft. Looking back, Giuseppe places enormous value on his training. He refers to his three summers there as his “second school”, adding that the experience revealed and honed his ability and his intent, instilling in him a lifelong dedication to excellence. Eventually, having proved his tenacity and ability to his family, Giuseppe was able to attend the Valenza jewelry school – Istituto Professionale Orafo - full-time, studying there for three years. The school offered an exceptional breadth of training: goldsmithing, engraving, stone-setting, design, ornamental design, gemology, every aspect of jewelry making. After his three years at jewelry school, when Giuseppe was just 20, he went to London for eight months to learn English, which proved to be an enormously valuable asset: on his return he was the only man in Valenza to speak English at a time of rapid internationalization and huge increase in exports. He took a job with a company focused entirely on export, and, aged just 23, he began travelling extensively, continuing for several years, building valuable experience and contacts, broadening his grasp of every aspect of the business. So much so, that when he left the company in 1966, he felt ready to embark on his own venture, and in 1967, he set up his own business, Picchiotti, with his sister Annamaria. Having established his own company in his hometown Valenza in 1967, where he grew up absorbing, as if by osmosis, the artistic atmosphere of the town, Giuseppe was instrumental in forging an entirely fresh, exciting and dynamic style of contemporary Italian jewelry design, a style that influenced jewelry across the world, ensuring Italian jewelers led the way forward into a new era of masterful modernity. It is here in Valenza that that the Picchiotti family 50 years later – two generations and seven family members – quietly, steadfastly and passionately celebrates and perpetuates its rich heritage. Picchiotti, today the pre-eminent jeweler of Valenza, and a typically Italian family-run business, embodies the classical nobility of Italian jewelry, reserving its essence, dignity and timelessness and at the same time, injecting this classicism with a flourish of contemporary Italian fashion flair. In true Italian spirit, the Picchiotti family challenges the conventions they so revere, pushing boundaries of craftsmanship and technology, which in turn liberates design and stimulates creativity, reinventing the classics, making them modern.