The Story

Balancing the Opposites

We can’t give you an exact date, but we know for sure it all started when Annegret Morf walked up the stairs of an old, Tuscan farmhouse where she had moved into a rented room the evening before. She was coming up the stairs exactly at that time because the bus from Florence had just dropped her off a short walk away. She’d been in Florence for her art restoration classes and remained there afterwards to run some errands.

At the top of the stairs, a payphone hung on the wall. It was ringing. A young Antonio Serafino was coming out of the kitchen to answer it.  He’d taken the bus before Annegret’s to get back from a small factory, where he worked making wrought iron lamps and tables. They glanced at each other. We’re not sure what went through their minds, but we know it was not love at first sight … but each was curious about the other.

Fast forward three months and they were an item. No need to go into their tumultuous courtship. He was her working-class hero and she his bourgeois princess.

No, that’s just a bit too cliché. Let’s start over.

He pestered her mercilessly and accused her of being a spoiled, rich, bourgeois Swiss kid going to school in Florence until she got fed up.  She challenged him to “get real” and go back to school to make his dream of becoming goldsmith come true. So he did.

They were two young people looking beyond their fate. She treasured his street wisdom. He found solace in her ease with culture and society. She grew up listening to her parents read Greek myths as bedtime stories. He grew up in the mysterious places those stories had taken place.

Her mission was to defy the typically European notion that the daughter of academics could not be an artisan. His mission was to achieve what his dad, a shoemaker who grew up in Italy during World War II, had not accomplished.

A karmic relationship? Perhaps.

At the time, they had no idea what they were getting into. They had no idea they were laying the foundations for a successful and effervescent jewelry studio by the name of SERAFINO.