A story of Italian magic

Entry posted by jerdge October 4, 2011

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WARNING: extreme romanticism below :wub:

:wub: read at your own peril! :wub:

In October 2005, I was on a short trip in Firenze (Florence), Italy, with my (at the time) girlfriend.

Walking on the Ponte Vecchio we were looking at the windows of the jewelry shops that occupy both sides of the bridge, when our attention was attracted by a golden ring with seven stones of different colours. We both didn't much like yellow gold and we thus entered the shop to ask whether they maybe had a white gold version of it - you know, when you think: "I don't even know if I really want it, but I could at least ask... Why not?"

Obviously they had it. It was a nice moment for a present thus I bought it on a whim (I am not good at keeping money in my pockets) and there it was, "just" another present for my girlfriend. Why not?

Along the coming months we started joking about that ring, calling it "the engagement ring", and of course - long story short - the joke became more and more serious... Before an year had passed, at the end of September 2006, we married.

Since then we jokingly say that the "engagement ring" had to have some magic in it, as it came to us before we knew of its real nature.

At some point one of the stones of the ring went missing. While we would have had numerous occasion to have it repaired in any nearby jewelry, we tacitly thought that such a "magic" ring couldn't be fixed in just any jewelry shop.

Again without a plan we recently decided for another short trip in Toscana, and there we found ourselves again on the Ponte Vecchio, in front of the same shop and with the same ring in our hands, almost six years later and on the eve of the fifth anniversary of our wedding. None of us had showed any anxiety to have the ring repaired, but as we were there we thought: why not?

In and out, we had left the ring at the shop, with the agreement that the next morning the owner would have asked to the artisan what could be done to replace the stone.

Magic of the ring? The artisan could buy the right stone with the right cut and by the evening of our anniversary we had the ring restored back to its full glory: