Bvlgari Maglia Milanese Monete: Ancient Rome Meets Renaissance Gold

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

At LVMH Watch Week 2026, the Roman Maison unveils a secret watch that weaves together millennia of craft — an authentic imperial coin, a Renaissance goldsmithing technique, and one of the smallest mechanical movements in the world.

There are houses that reference history, and there are houses that wear it. Bvlgari has always belonged firmly to the second category. Since Sotirios Voulgaris, a Greek silversmith, opened his first boutique in Rome in 1884, the Maison has drawn its creative lifeblood from the art, architecture, and material culture of antiquity as a living, tangible presence to be set in gold and worn against the skin.

Nowhere is this philosophy more eloquently expressed than in the Monete collection. And nowhere has Monete looked quite like this: presented in Milan at LVMH Watch Week 2026, the new Maglia Milanese Monete is a secret watch in rose gold that brings together an authentic ancient Roman coin, a bracelet woven in the centuries-old Milanese mesh technique, and the Piccolissimo BVP100 — one of the smallest round mechanical calibres ever produced. It is, in the truest sense, a piece where every element carries the weight of its own history.

Monete: Fragments of Eternity

The story of the Monete collection begins in the mid-1960s, in a Rome still shimmering with the glamour of La Dolce Vita and the cultural confidence of Il Boom. Nicola Bulgari, grandson of the founder and a passionate numismatist from a young age, had long been fascinated by ancient coins as miniature works of art charged with political symbolism, divine protection, and imperial ambition. In antiquity, coins set into jewellery served as talismans, declarations of allegiance, and marks of status; the practice can be traced as far back as the seventh century BC.

In 1966, Nicola Bulgari formalised this fascination into what would become one of the Maison’s most distinctive signatures. He began mounting authentic Greek and Roman coins into bold, contemporary jewellery — necklaces, bracelets, rings, and eventually watches — treating each coin with the reverence normally reserved for the rarest gemstones. The concept was brilliantly simple and unmistakably Roman: why not do something contemporary with what is immortal?

From the outset, the collection established rigorous standards. Only genuine coins are used, each one carefully sourced by a dedicated team of numismatic specialists. When multiple coins appear on a single piece, they are selected from the same civilisation and period. Every mount is engraved in Roman-style lettering with the name of the figure depicted and the date of the coin’s origin. The result is jewellery that functions simultaneously as adornment and as a portable museum — a fragment of eternity set against the warmth of gold.

Over the decades, Monete has attracted some of the most celebrated women of the twentieth century. Grace Kelly was photographed wearing a Monete necklace in Monte Carlo in 1972; Elizabeth Taylor, whose legendary love affair with Bvlgari is part of the Maison’s mythology, was a devoted collector. Today, the collection extends from jewellery into haute horlogerie, with secret watches that conceal time beneath the ancient profiles of emperors and empresses — a gesture that feels both poetic and deeply Bvlgari.

The Coin: Emperor Caracalla and the Memory of Empire

The Maglia Milanese Monete Secret Watch carries an authentic silver coin dating from 198–297 AD, bearing the portrait of Emperor Caracalla. Born in 188 AD as the eldest son of Septimius Severus, Caracalla ruled — first alongside his father, then as sole emperor — until his assassination in 217 AD. His reign was marked by ambitious military campaigns, monumental public works, and the famous Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 AD, which extended Roman citizenship to virtually all free inhabitants of the Empire.

In numismatic terms, Caracalla occupies a particularly significant position. He introduced the antoninianus around 215 AD, a new silver denomination that would profoundly reshape the Roman monetary system. His coins, widely minted across the Empire, are among the most recognisable portraits in ancient numismatics — the laureate head, the intense gaze, the military drapery that speaks of imperial authority.

Set into the Maglia Milanese Monete, the coin serves not merely as decoration but as the watch’s face — the first thing one encounters. The time display lies hidden beneath, revealed only when the coin cover is lifted. It is the quintessential Bvlgari gesture: history does not illustrate the design; it is the design.

Maglia Milanese: A Renaissance Art Reborn

If the coin anchors the watch in Roman antiquity, the bracelet transports it to another great chapter of Italian craft: the goldsmithing workshops of Renaissance Milan. Milanese mesh — maglia milanese — is a technique developed by Lombard goldsmiths who discovered that finely interlaced gold wire could produce a textile-like fabric of extraordinary suppleness and luminosity. The technique, which can be traced to Etruscan precedents but flourished most notably during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, produces a surface that is at once fluid and structured, catching light with the subtle shimmer of woven metal.

For the first time in its history, Bvlgari has applied this technique to a Monete creation. The bracelet of the Maglia Milanese Monete is crafted entirely in rose gold, with interlaced threads that drape around the wrist with a softness that belies the preciousness of the material. It is, as Creative Director Fabrizio Buonamassa Stigliani has described, a revelation — an unexpected pairing that brings together the geometric rigour of the octagonal case, the archaeological gravitas of the ancient coin, and the delicate, almost textile suppleness of the mesh.

The choice to present this creation in Milan — the historical cradle of the technique — adds a further layer of intentionality. For a Maison whose identity is so profoundly Roman, this deliberate geographical homage to Milanese craft signals a broader vision of Italian excellence, one that embraces the full richness of the peninsula’s artisanal heritage.

Another notable first: the Maglia Milanese Monete is fitted with a pin buckle, a departure from the folding clasps traditionally used in the collection. It is a subtle detail, but one that contributes to the piece’s contemporary character — a watch that honours the past without being constrained by it.

Piccolissimo BVP100: Mechanical Mastery in Miniature

Beneath the coin and the mother-of-pearl dial — adorned with twelve diamond hour markers and rose gold-plated hands — beats the Piccolissimo BVP100, a hand-wound micro-movement that represents one of Bvlgari’s most impressive feats of mechanical engineering. Measuring just 13.50 mm in diameter, 2.50 mm in thickness, and weighing a mere 1.9 grams, this 102-component calibre is, according to Bvlgari, the smallest round mechanical movement produced today.

First introduced in 2022, the Piccolissimo was born from the expertise that the Maison accumulated through its record-breaking Octo Finissimo programme, which redefined the boundaries of ultra-thin watchmaking over seven consecutive years. Designed and produced entirely at Bvlgari’s manufacture in Le Sentier, in the Swiss Jura, the calibre operates at a frequency of 21,600 vibrations per hour and delivers a power reserve of 30 hours.

For the Maglia Milanese Monete, the BVP100 appears in an updated configuration: it now features crown winding — a significant evolution from the caseback-winding system of earlier iterations — and a sapphire crystal caseback that reveals the movement’s finely finished architecture. This is a meaningful statement of confidence. Where previous secret Monete watches kept their mechanical heart entirely concealed, this new creation invites the wearer to look, to admire, to understand. The secret is no longer just about hiding time; it is about choosing when to reveal it.

The Art of Gold

Bvlgari presented its LVMH Watch Week 2026 novelties under the evocative banner The Art of Gold, and the Maglia Milanese Monete embodies that theme with rare completeness. The rose gold case, set with 0.50 carats of brilliant-cut diamonds; the crown, crowned by a further diamond; the ancient silver coin with its patina of nearly two millennia; the interlaced gold mesh that recalls the workshops of Renaissance Milan; and within it all, a Swiss-made movement so small it could rest on a fingertip.

It is a creation that speaks Bvlgari’s language with uncommon fluency — eclectic, cultured, sensuous, and utterly self-assured. A watch that does not merely tell time, but carries it.