Ilaria

Ilaria Ciabatti, a Florentine artist who once taught school in Lima, may have done more to raise the profile and awareness of the traditions of Peruvian silversmiths than anyone else in the past two decades. She founded her company in 1992 to export sterling silver and jewelry to a store in Milan and then to Paris, Switzerland and Spain. The work she commissioned from local artisans sold so well abroad that she began to work with them to create jewelry that used local materials, such as Andean opals, sodalite and Peruvian turquoise. Today she has multiple stores in Peru and is considered the Elsa Peretti of her country, both for her jewelry and for her home designs.