We ask our students to be explorers,
Alchimia is uniquely positioned in one of the most beautiful cities in the world: Florence.
Alchimia is in the heart of the San Frediano neighbourhood, in the lively Oltrarno district, that is still thriving with the Italian artisanial traditions: from the 200 years old silk industry, to master of wood inlay and semi-precious stones, to the numerous goldsmiths, restoration studios, and leather workers creating custom-made shoes and accessories.
Alchimia is a nexus where all these influences come together, where the school’s surroundings are filled with beauty and art, and where people from many countries and cultures come together: A BEATING HEART where each student’s artistic and personal growth is not only possible but also natural.
Alchimia is one of the very few schools in the world exclusively dedicated to the study of contemporary jewellery. When it opened in 1998, there was no other school like it in Italy.
Throughout human history, jewellery has never been merely ornamental. It has always carried a strong symbolic value: it highlights social, religious, and political status, it represents rites of passage, it marks the beginning or end of important events, it is a token of love, a custodian of memory, the heirloom par excellence
The decalogue
Merging tradition and innovation
Tradition and Innovation: Respect, pass on, and reinterpret classic goldsmithing methods—particularly Italian ones.
Focused Teaching: A method based on rigor and familiarity, balancing theory and practice, embracing diverse perspectives, and constant enrichment.
Excellence in Teaching: Italian and international teachers of the highest level, sharing both their skills and a common goal.
Care for Students: Attention to individual qualities, valuing cultural diversity, encouraging innovative career paths.
Research and Experimentation: Continuous innovation in materials, forms, processes, and teaching methods, recognized internationally.
Passion is the word that represents our philosophy
Passion: The essence of every project: love for well-crafted work, aspiration for constant improvement, and human connection
International Outlook: Rooted in Florence, yet open to the world: global collaborations, cultural exchanges, and a shared creative language.
Cross-Disciplinarity: Breaking artificial boundaries between art, craft, and other disciplines, combining conceptualization with technical execution.
Independence: Independence from external constraints, safeguarding integrity, professionalism, and creative freedom.
Vision: With one foot in the arts and one in technical and technological research (including industrial applications), our vision is increasingly structured as a place that fosters and disseminates creative means of production and learning. In other words, we envision a permanent connection between worlds that are often perceived as being apart but that may actually enhance one another.
Jewellery
Jewellery has always marked out popular culture and has attentively shown its evolution: our ambition from the beginning has been to open up a dialogue between past and present, bringing these values back to the here and now, using a contemporary language.
What is contemporary jewellery today? To whom and to what does it refer? What are its reasons for existing? What is the current concept of value? In a globalised world, what creative context are we working in? Researching to find answers makes us reflect and brings up other questions which then form the basis for further conceptual and practical research.
Great artists and committed teachers, such as Giampaolo Babetto and Manfred Bischoff have been important companions on this journey and have made highly significant contributions to the identity of Alchimia, offering their collaboration and unwavering belief in this project. The aesthetics, philosophy and didactics have benefited immeasurably by inviting the greatest interpreters of international contemporary jewellery to take on the role of tutor and engage in a constant dialogue with our students.
The consequence of this immersion in the diverse styles, cultures and mindsets of the teachers and students has been the search for an unprecedented universal creative language in continuous development
A stylistic and conceptual evolution that has made the Alchimia of today unique in the world, not just as a place of study but also in the growth of autonomous creativity.
Since 2016 Alchimia has operated in two different locations, one dedicated to the Bachelor in Fine Arts major in Contemporary Jewellery and Intensive Courses, and the other exclusively for the students of the Masters in Fine Arts major in Contemporary Jewellery and Cultural Identity.
Both Alchimia sites are in the historic centre of Florence, Italy, something which we believe contributes a great deal to the school’s unique character. Alchimia is a place of intense activity with exhibitions, symposia, lectures, collaborations with museums, contemporary art galleries, and centres of design, as well as participation in events and competitions. Every year, it is here that students and teachers come together to create and carry out extraordinary projects, immensely valuable in the way they increase students confidence in their own abilities and place them on the international art scene.
Lucia Massei
Director Co-Founder