Display counters at Senso Ristorante and Bar in Ann Siang Hill in Singapore during the launch of Bulgari’s Mediterranean Eden collection

MAILA, Philippines -- Following the big launch of Bulgari’s Mediterranean Eden collection at the Bulgari Hotel, Milan during Milan Fashion Week early this year, this proverbial garden traveled eastward to Singapore recently, transporting itself into an old, longstanding hotspot, the Senso Ristorante and Bar, on the quaint Ann Siang Hill in the better part of Chinatown lined by elegantly restored shophouses.

More than a garden of unimagined perfection, Mediterranean Eden is a treasure trove of prized metals like yellow gold and ancient coins, precious stones like amethysts, diamonds, peridots, and topazes, and ancient symbols of worth, strength, beauty, and pre-eminence, such as the lion, the snake, and the flower.

The lion and the serpent

Mediterranean Eden, drawn from biblical utopia and embellished with the age-old emblems of Bulgari’s Greco-Roman heritage, is an exquisite collection of jewelry, handbags, and other accessories like scarves, belts, and sunglasses for fall/winter 2011-2012, along with its newest fragrance, Mon Jasmin Noir.

Integrating previous lines like the Serpenti, Leoni, and Monete, including a capsule collection continuing the brand’s collaboration with actress Isabella Rosellini, this latest collection is a collage of the same inspirations that have always guided Bulgari in matching the world’s luxury cravings with a piece of paradise.

Notwithstanding the many elements, both mythical and corporeal, and the variety of materials featured in the collection, the bedrock of this year’s foray into the divine origins of all things beautiful remains true to the Bulgari trademark: simplicity and elegance. Emblematic in a new line of day bags in karung skin, for example, is a shoulder bag that is, in form, linear and understated, a study in sophisticated minimalism, punctuated only by a jewel closure made of finely enameled serpent head with malachite eyes whose body, fluid and graceful, extends into the fine chain.

Serpentine touches are as integral to this collection as the snake was to this heaven on earth.  The serpent, considered a symbol of eternity by the ancient Egyptians and of wisdom and knowledge, vitality and health, rebirth and immortality by the ancient Romans, has played a key role in the evolution of the Bulgari style. In 1962, while filming Cleopatra, the late Elizabeth Taylor wore a classic example of the brand’s worship of the snake in the form of a timepiece that featured a serpent head in diamond pavé and an emerald eye, embellished with a row of marquise-cut diamonds. In 2011’s collection of evening clutches, such as in a minaudiére with geometric ornaments of gold on black enamel, a serpent head decorates the clasp. A serpentine presence also informs a line of coordinated accessories, including thin double-wrap belts, leather bracelets, and wallet-pochettes.

Another classic Bulgari icon is the lion, the embodiment of nobility, power, and majesty. In the Mediterranean Eden collection, this timeless symbol is reinterpreted in the Leoni handbags and clutches, where dueling lions appear at the clasp, further enlivening materials such as carved patent leather imbued with the feathers of colorful birds or wrinkled lambskin. This icon also appears in the sunglasses, adorning the temples of the exclusively butterfly frames in a palette of neutrals, such as spotted tobacco and ivory white, embellished with a cabochon-cut stone to unify the leonine profiles.

Stone meet metal

New this year is a surprising technique of chromatically combining gold and stones to achieve the effect of a pebble, a throwback to ancient coasts and virgin beaches covered in a blanket of unusual forms and color harmonies. In the new colored collection of necklaces, art finds expression in the delicate combination of precious and semi-precious gems, conventional and irregular cuts, all mounted to form colliers, long chains, or multi-strand neckpieces. So refreshing are the precious pairings of such gems as white gold with topaz and amethyst with peridot. The white ceramic stone, young and modern, is particularly a jewel to the eye.

This same artful, sensual approach to combinations and permutations is repeated in the rings and earrings in yellow gold, where coral or peridot, apart from diamonds, alternating with amethysts and turquoises has been originated. The crown on the jewel of this ring collection in yellow gold is the ravishingly soft cabochon-cut amethyst or peridot. On the sunglasses, aptly themed “Mediterranean Nights,” some of these same stones, along with aquamarine and opal crystals, subtly illuminate the acetate temples, “like colored pebbles smoothed by the sea.”

Greek, Roman, and Persian coins add immeasurable value to the Mediterranean Eden collection. This is not new, not to the Roman history of jewelry-making and certainly not to Bulgari, which began inserting ancient coins of significant historical, artistic, and aesthetic value into precious objects first in the 1930s and then again in the 1960s, when, incorporating such coins into long gourmette necklaces, it gave life to and popularized the expression gemme nummarie or coin jewels, making coins as precious as the rarest of gemstones. In this year’s collection, the coins are a rare, covetable beauty, adorned by ancient Greco-Roman profiles as those of Alexander the Great, Athena the Goddess of Wisdom, the deity Roma who represented the City of Rome, and Zeus, “the father of gods and men.”

In the necklaces, these coin jewels play on the contrasts between worlds ancient and modern, as well as between metals, the antique patina of the coins and the polished gleam of the soft, natural forms of the stones in yellow gold alternating with and setting off each other. Some long-strand necklaces have as many as four coins, each of which comes with a certificate of authenticity. In the new Monete line of bags, reproductions of ancient coins depicting imperial profiles are framed within the characteristic double chain handle that comes with every expert variation of lizard skin and, in the maxi-sunglasses in acetate, they are set in the temples, their aesthetic and value tinted with the colors of the Mediterranean.

Language of flowers

What provides a softer, more feminine touch to this collection of choice metals, fine leathers, and precious stones is the flowers. “Nature’s most generous expression of beauty,” as Bulgari describes them, is in full bloom in the Mediterranean Eden’s collection of scarves and stoles. Its silk satin foulards in bold, contemporary colors celebrate the architecture of the Italian Renaissance garden, replete with fountains, marble statues, and boxwood hedges. In a piece called “Lions in Love,” the double lion head emerges from a tangle of foliage that sprawls through the silk like a surreal forest while in the “Safari” stole, as if pulling out of the edges of a thick forest into a savannah, zebra prints come into play, revealing through the subtle impression of the double lion head the classic, timeless, immutable story of predator and prey. There are many such other floral themes in this collection, all as elaborate and eloquent as the visuals in storybooks, including “Flower Market,” an adaptation of Bulgari’s historic brooches flourishing in an enchanting greenhouse; “Absolut Green,” a bouquet of multicolored flowers on sophisticated foulards; and the cashmere stoles bearing images of Moorish gardens from Bulgari’s “Alhambra” series.

But the language of flowers is no more persuasive than in the new fragrance from Bulgari—Mon Jasmin Noir, the updated version of the dark, mysterious, and popular Jasmin Noir for women, which provides an olfactory statement to the Mediterranean Eden collection. Extracted from the essence of the imaginary black jasmine, the most desirable flower in the garden of Eden, the fragrance surges with sparkling top notes of golden cedrat and lilies of the valley, lingers with the bewitching heart notes of sambac jasmine and “Angel Wing” jasmine, and ultimately leaves you in an addictive dry down of musky nougatine and vibrant wood.

The new face of innocence

Lastly, what is Eden without Eve? Appearing nude in the campaign like the biblical temptress, American actor, singer, and model Kirsten Dunst, best known for such choice roles as the child vampire Claudia in 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, the troubled teen Lux Lisbon in 1999’s The Virgin Suicides, and the damned queen in 2006’s Marie Antoinette, is the face of Mediterranean Eden. Like Bulgari’s 2010 frontwoman Julianne Moore before her, Dunst is chosen not only based on her physical attributes or her mainstream popularity, but, perhaps more important, on her sensibilities as a woman and an artist, which enable her to shuttle between now and then, knowing almost by instinct what is timeless and constant in these two worlds, one of which seemingly stays irretrievably behind while the other hurtles inexorably forward.

This is Eden, after all. Or all that it stands for, which refuses to be forgotten, no matter how far we may have strayed from it. To Bulgari, the return to Eden is a reinvention of the classics. To us, ever regretful of the paradise we have lost yet ever hopeful of finding it again, it is, piece per piece, like a homecoming.