Christie’s Paris auctions Claudia Cardinale’s Bulgari jewels from her collection

What collectors buy from Claudia Cardinale is not just Bulgari gold, enamel and gemstones. They buy the trace of an actress whose jewels were chosen, cherished and worn, which gives these pieces a charge ordinary auction lots rarely have: the sense that they lived on a red carpet, in private, and inside one of Italian cinema’s most visible lives.

Christie’s Paris will place about 20 pieces from Cardinale’s personal collection in its Joaillerie Paris online sale from June 16 to 26, with the jewels exhibited in Geneva from May 7 to 13 and in Paris from June 19 to 26. The timing gives the sale an unusually tight frame of reference. Christie’s has linked it to a tribute at the Cannes Film Festival and to the 65th anniversary of Cardinale’s first appearance on the Cannes red carpet in 1961, turning the auction into both a tribute and a study in how celebrity ownership can sharpen value.

The strongest lot is a circa-1965 Bulgari Serpenti bracelet-watch in blue and white enamel, with pear-shaped sapphires set as the snake’s eyes. Its high estimate reaches €250,000, a level that reflects more than materials alone. Signed vintage Bulgari pieces already draw serious attention from collectors, but the Cardinale name adds a second layer of desirability: provenance that is personal, glamorous and highly legible. A Bulgari ruby ring is estimated at up to €100,000, while two additional Bulgari rings carry estimates of up to €80,000 each.

That emphasis on signed, wearable jewels matters because Cardinale’s collection sits at the intersection of fashion memory and hard collectibles logic. A bracelet-watch from the mid-1960s is not merely decorative; it is a compact artifact of an era when Bulgari’s bold Roman designs were becoming shorthand for international style. Cardinale’s association with the house, both on the red carpet and in private life, gives those designs a specificity that anonymous vintage jewelry cannot match.

Christie’s also said a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Fondazione Claudia Cardinale, the foundation she created with her daughter Claudia Squitieri to support contemporary audiovisual creation and women artists. Cardinale, who died in September 2025 at 87, is being framed not only as an actress of Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini’s cinema, alongside Alain Delon, but as a collector whose own jewels extend her legacy. In the auction room, that kind of provenance can change a piece from beautiful to significant.