I wasn't looking for it.
That's the part people don't understand when they ask how a jewelry company starts. They imagine a business plan, a flash of entrepreneurial ambition, a calculated pivot. They don't imagine a woman on a family vacation, standing in a small piazza on an island most Americans have never heard of, looking up at a church window and thinking: that's it.
But that's exactly how it happened.
The Long Way Around
I should back up. By the time I landed in Sicily, I'd already been making jewelry for several years — beaded designs I sold to build the business one bracelet at a time. I loved the work. I loved having something that was mine. After teaching and coaching tennis and raising my children, I'd started Kirsten Dexter Fine Jewelry just as they were heading off to college, and the beaded pieces were how I bootstrapped it. Every sale went back into the company, building toward something I could feel but couldn't yet name.
What I really wanted was to design in metal. To make pieces with weight and permanence. Pieces that meant something beyond the season. But that takes capital — gold, diamonds, skilled craftsmen, casting, finishing. So I was patient. I sold what I could make, and I waited for the design that would be worth the leap.
We were on our way to Turkey for my son's wedding — he and his wife had married in New York first, and this was the celebration with her family in Kaş. Our son was already there, so it was just my husband, our daughter, and me. We'd planned a bike trip through Sicily on the way, because that's how my family travels. We don't sit by the pool. We ride, we walk, we cover ground. And cycling through Sicily — the hills, the coastal roads, the towns that appear around every bend — is one of the best ways to feel the island rather than just see it.
I had no agenda beyond being with my family and wearing myself out on Sicilian hills. I certainly wasn't expecting to find the design that would change the direction of my company.
I found it in Siracusa.
Ortigia
If you haven't been to Sicily's southeastern coast, Ortigia is the place to start. It's a tiny island — you can walk across it in twenty minutes — connected to the city of Siracusa by a short bridge. But crossing that bridge feels like stepping back several centuries.
The island is a compression of everything that makes Sicily extraordinary. Greek temple columns built into the walls of a Baroque cathedral. Norman arches over Arabic courtyards. Laundry strung between buildings that have been standing since before Columbus sailed. Every civilization that has passed through Sicily left something behind on Ortigia, and nothing was ever torn down — it was simply built over, absorbed, layered into the next chapter.
You feel this everywhere. In the crumbling limestone. In the wrought iron balconies with their improbable curves. In the way the late afternoon light hits the pale stone and turns the whole island golden.
But I wasn't thinking about any of that when I turned the corner into Piazza del Precursore.
The Window
Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista — the Church of St. John the Baptist — isn't a place that makes the guidebooks. It doesn't compete with the Duomo or the Temple of Apollo. It sits in a quiet piazza, and most people who pass it are on their way somewhere else.
I stopped because of the rose window.
It's a 15th-century window, not especially large, with a geometric pattern that radiates from the center like a stone flower. The tracery is intricate without being fussy — each section proportioned with the kind of mathematical confidence that medieval craftsmen carried in their hands, not on paper. It has the quality I've since learned to look for in the best architectural details: it rewards you for looking closer.
What I didn't know then, standing in that piazza with my family, was the window's history. In 1693, a catastrophic earthquake devastated southeastern Sicily, leveling seventy towns and killing an estimated sixty thousand people. Siracusa was badly damaged. Churches crumbled. Entire neighborhoods disappeared.
But this window survived.
When I learned that, something shifted. I wasn't just looking at a beautiful pattern anymore. I was looking at something that had outlasted catastrophe. Something fragile-looking that turned out to be extraordinarily strong. Something that had been standing quietly in its piazza for five hundred years, waiting for someone to really look at it.
I didn't sketch it that day. I photographed it from every angle I could manage without alarming my family, and I carried those images home to Charlotte. It was weeks later, sitting at my desk with those photographs spread in front of me, that I started to draw. That distance — between seeing something and drawing it — is where I do my best work. The first impression fades and what's left is what actually matters: the structure, the proportions, the story the details are trying to tell.
The Sicily pendant became my first architectural piece. A 15th-century rose window translated into 32mm of metal and diamond. The variations in thickness give it dimension — it catches light the way the original catches the Sicilian sun. It has weight in your hand. It feels like something that will last.
It was the leap I'd been building toward for years. Every beaded bracelet I'd sold had been a step toward this moment — toward the capital and the confidence to work in gold, to invest in the craftsmanship that a design like this demanded. Sicily wasn't just my first pendant. It was proof that the thing I'd been patient for was real.
What Came After
Everything I've designed since — the Barcelona pieces inspired by Gothic Quarter ironwork, the Milan collection born from hidden courtyards, the NYC Talisman drawn from St. Patrick's rose window — traces back to that afternoon in Piazza del Precursore. Sicily taught me what I was actually looking for: architectural details that have survived, that carry history in their geometry, that reveal more the longer you look.
It also taught me something about the relationship between patience and readiness. I'd spent years making beaded jewelry, building a business dollar by dollar, waiting for something I couldn't describe. And when I found it — on a tiny island, on the way to my son's wedding, in a piazza most tourists never visit — I recognized it instantly.
If You Go
Ortigia, Siracusa is best reached by flying into Catania and driving about an hour south. The island is entirely walkable and best explored on foot.
Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista is in Piazza del Precursore. It's not a major tourist stop, which is part of its charm. Go in the morning when the light is best on the facade.
Don't miss: The Duomo di Siracusa, built into the columns of a 5th-century BC Greek temple — you can still see the original Doric columns in the exterior walls. The morning market near the Temple of Apollo. An evening passeggiata along the Lungomare, where the sea and the stone turn the same shade of amber at sunset.
While you're in southeastern Sicily: The Baroque towns of Noto, Ragusa, and Modica are all within an hour's drive and worth at least a day each. Noto in particular is extraordinary — an entire city rebuilt in golden limestone after the 1693 earthquake that the rose window survived.
The Sicily Collection is available at kirstendexter.com in 14K gold and vermeil with diamond accents.