The Stones Of Venice

From the Stylish 16th-century Townhouse She Calls Home to Her Gem-filled Atelier Across the Grand Canal, Jeweler Antonia Miletto Leads a Fairy-tale Existence in Venice.

- Stellene Volandes

THIS IS THE BEAUTY AND TRAGEDY of my life,” says Antonia Miletto. “When I am there I want to be here, and when I am here I want to be there.” If she and I were there— Venice, Italy—we would be having a coffee at Gelateria Paolin, a charming outdoor café on Campo Santo Stefano, not far from her jewelry shop. But we are here—New York City, where Miletto keeps an apartment and is in town for a month to take a jewelry-sketching class. We settle for Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue.

Miletto wears, as she always does, a heavy gold chain ring with a vintage diamond at the center. The stone, she tells me, was her grandmother’s. On top of it is a newer design featuring a large black-glass intaglio she found in Rome. “There were about 20 of them glued onto a page with the word Lalique handwritten across the top,” Miletto says. She has incorporated the discovery into several new pieces of intaglio jewelry—rings, earrings, pendants hung from gold wire—largely surrounded by her signature ebony etched with a line of pavé diamonds.

Family treasures and treasures found—be they Roman intaglios, old-mine-cut diamonds, bronze rhino statues, Neapolitan drawings, maternal portraits in Carnival dress, carved wooden tables, or antique glass chandeliers—are at the heart of how Miletto creates and how she lives. “I never think of this place as finished,” she says of her three-story house in Venice’s Santa Croce neighborhood, which she has furnished with family antiques and modern curiosities. “It is always full of what I think of as ‘encounters,’ ” she says. “These are pieces I have ‘met’ or discovered throughout my life. It is also how I put together my jewelry.”