GUEST: This was my grandmother's jewelry. She and my grandfather came to America in 1939. They left Italy. They were Italian Jews, and they left from the persecution of the Jews from Mussolini. And my grandmother was pregnant with my mom, and she wore a fur coat and lined the fur coat with the jewelry in their travels. They didn't have travelers' checks then, so...
APPRAISER: (laughs) They just had jewels in fur coats.
GUEST: Yes, yes.
APPRAISER: And do you remember her wearing this at all?
GUEST: I think that one of the rings was her wedding ring. I believe that was her wedding ring. And the other ones, no, I don't recall.
APPRAISER: Okay. Well, this is a great collection of jewelry from the 1920s, so it's a great collection of Art Deco jewelry. None of it's marked, but it was probably manufactured in Europe, maybe in Italy. I'll just go through the pieces briefly, one by one. The first is this brooch, which is what we call a bar pin. And in the center is a beautiful step-cut, emerald-cut diamond. It's a beautiful diamond. By formula, it's about three carats. And then on either side are what we call old European cut diamonds, and those are about two carats each. And then under it is that beautiful necklace with the five drops. And this is all set with old European cut diamonds. And I loved... these very, very thin drops are called knife-edge, which is very typical of Art Deco jewelry, and it's wonderful to see an intact necklace. A lot of times, they're cut apart to make earrings, so it's great to have. It has a little bit of a condition problem here, where it's a little bit loose, and that needs to be fixed, but that should be a pretty quick fix. So these are two platinum and diamond rings. This ring is an old European cut diamond, and it's about two carats. And this ring is an old European cut diamond, about one carat. And then finally, there are the diamond earrings, which are each about a carat, and they might be a little earlier than the rest of the jewelry. Those might be maybe from the teens, or the very early '20s. If this came up for auction today, I would expect that the whole group would bring at least $30,000.
GUEST: Oh, my goodness. (laughs) Yeah, that's extraordinary-- I hadn't expected that.
