Five generations of jewelers
HOW IT ALLA BEGAN
The origins of our family’s gold tradition date back to the mid-nineteenth century, when in Valenza Morosetti and Melchiorre established the fi rst goldsmithing factories. Some of their pupils, incuding Vincenzo Ceriana, started a business and continued their concept, working closely with designers from Paris which was the capital of fashion and Liberty style at that time.
We received Vincenzo Ceriana’s rich archive of drawings that date back to the last ten years of the nineteenth century.
One of Vincenzo Ceriana’s daughters married Costantino Raiteri, who, with his brother Giovanni, had taken over the laboratory of Giovanni’s father in law.
The Raiteri brothers were among the fi rst who exhibited at Milano fair and they developed a commercial sector getting in touch with the best jewelry stores of the biggest Italian cities.
Giovanni Raiteri
WHO WAS
Giovanni Raiteri was a very capable goldsmith and he created luxurious and refi ned jewels using more and more often valuable precious stones which he bought in Paris and Amsterdam.
He died in 1926, when he was only 36 years old. He left a rich archive full of drawings and sketches especially of platinum and diamonds bracelets and broches that Lenti has resumed in the last decades.
Giovanni’s brother, Costantino, continued the business alone untill the Second World War suspended the possibility of producing and selling jewels. Meanwhile, his daughter Matilde, who ran the accounting and the management of her father’s company, married the valuable jeweller, Pietro Carlo Lenti in 1940.
Pietro Carlo Lenti
THE FOUNDER
He learnt the goldsmith’s art when he was very young and, when he was eighteen years old, he started his own business. After the military service, he established a big factory with two business partners and they planned a rich distribution network in Italy, Istria and Dalmazia, taking care both of the purchase of valuable stones directly from Antwerp and of the import of watches from Switzerland.
When the war fi nished, Carlo Lenti and his wife Matilde started their own business, with brand 196 AL, bearing in mind their experience and developing new sectors like pearls. Also their son Alberto became interested in the family business: at the age of sixteen, when he was free of educational tasks, he began to go with his father to Antwerp in order to buy diamonds and coloured stones and to Switzerland to buy pearls.
Alberto Lenti
SON
After graduating in law, he devoted himself full time to goldsmithing, taking an interest in gemmology, a science that took its fi rst steps at that time. Then he established a gemmolgy department in his family’s company.
In those years the goldsmithing ativity was growing; the number of factories increased in Valenza and a big expo fl ow began.
The Lenti company preferred not to expand too much not to risk sacrifi cing its traditional handmade work, its care in details and the direct control in every phase of the production and sale.
Simona Lenti
PRESENT
Simona, Alberto’s daughter, graduated in Communication at Siena University with a degree thesis about the advertising campaign of the diamond company DeBeers and then she joined the family business taking care of marketing and commercial problems.
She married Andrea Piacentini who was already taking care of jewellery trade and he also joined the P. Carlo Lenti company, which today can count on a qualifi ed staff that makes it possible to satisfy every customer’s needs.
Simona and Alberto have three children, a girl named Giulia and two younger twins, Alberto and Davide… They are all too young but they are already fascinated by what is not just a job, but a real family tradition: the sixth generation is coming.
