Sogni d’Oro
The meaning of the Italian phrase “Sogni d’Oro” in English is “Dreams of Gold”. Italians say it to each other like we say “Sweet Dreams” before wishing someone a good night’s sleep. The name of our one-week destination jewelry retreats was inspired by this phrase.
Entrance to the old studio in Vietri sul Mare
It all started in 2020 during the first summer after Covid started and things in Italy where barely returning to normal when I had a small studio space in the Amalfi Coast town of Vietri sul Mare where I lived for 8 years prior to getting married and buying a home in the nearby countryside. I was researching information about buying a new torch here in Italy and at the time not really being connected to many contacts in the jewelry industry in this country I was at a bit of a loss to find what I really wanted.
The cheapish torch I had wasn’t really doing the job I wanted and I fought with it more than I seemed to solder. It was something meant for a plumber, not a jeweler. I never really liked it and I missed my Little Smith torch I have in the US. A previous knock-off I had purchased from AliExpress I quickly learned wasn’t going to work in Italy when it arrived. You see, just like the plugs on your electric hair tools or chargers don’t work when you travel abroad because the outlets around the world change, so do the gas fittings on the tanks unless you use adaptors.
I started doing research to find a solution because any jeweler’s supply sites I found in Italy quite honestly are crap when compared to the wealth of information you can find on RioGrande.com. You’re lucky if you can find listings of the actual products they sell with some sort of description (usually in Italian only, of course). I found through the Little Smith company that they make a European version, but they don’t have any specifics about which country in specific it would be. Crossing my research over into the RV world where campers use propane tanks like we do in the jewelry industry I found many online discussions about all the different adapters and how the tanks are different from Portugal to Italy to Switzerland (or something like that). Unfortunately, Little Smith couldn’t give me any useful info because they didn’t know which European country the Euro model was designed for. They manufacture but don’t sell to the public directly it seems. At one point I ended up contacting Otto Frei (because of some other random torch parts I purchased many years previously and brought over during a previous trip home to Florida). Someone there put me in touch with the tech department when I explained what I had and what I wanted to do. This is how I met Jim Dailing.
If you don’t know Jim yet, I’ll tell you that he’s super-friendly and we hit it off right away. He did his best to help me find a solution and even offered to deliver something in person just to have an excuse to travel to Italy again, but in the end I decided I couldn’t be sure and thought it was best to buy a local Italian product and not risk messing around with any adapter with gas connections. During our conversations he expressed how he was interested to return to Italy when he learned that I lived here. He had a dream for many years after a visit to Italy to teach a jewelry workshop here one day. I told him that it had been my idea for quite a while to organize events where guest instructors could teach and I would plan the week with outings to local sites to create a complete retreat package.
You see, besides trying to be a creative jeweler in my spare time and working as an English teacher at local university, I also did work in the tourism industry organizing private tours for English-speaking guests with local guides or led my own excursions as an accompanist for hiking or boating trips around the coast until Covid halted all tourism from abroad in 2020. This conversation is when the foundation was laid. Jim had finally found someone to collaborate with that could make his dream come true and I had an instructor who could help me get my idea off the ground. Our “dreams of gold” were about to come true and we got to work planning our first retreat. The first dates we planned was going to happen in September 2021… but Covid and Italian travel restrictions continued and we had to postpone.
For the next two years travel restrictions in Italy were better, yet still uncertain in 2022, and really my life had also changed drastically. Suddenly I was planning not one, but two weddings (one in Italy in 2022 and one in Florida in 2023) and my new husband and I also bought a big house which needed a lot of work. Needless to say, we have been busy, but this big house is nearly ready to start hosting guests for events in the studio because now I actually have enough space to have a classroom - something that my small studio in Vietri never would have allowed. So here we are finally, back on schedule for September 2024!
Alas, it’s late at night now as I write this and I should have gone to bed over an hour ago. Buonanotte e sogni d’oro!