A potter's hands raise the walls of a clay cylinder on the wheel, with shelves of unfired pieces drying behind.

Handmade objects and craftsmanship

Ceramics

Ceramics is the material human beings have worked for the longest time. Earth mixed with water, shaped, dried and fired is the first invention that gave form to the everyday gesture: to contain, to store, to serve. In Tuscany ceramics has a history that has never been interrupted — from medieval maiolica to the porcelain of Doccia, from popular earthenware to contemporary research — and that today lives in workshops scattered across the whole territory.

Shelves of pale pots show through an open door; the alley runs on beneath an arch that opens onto the hills.

Where

Where it is practised in Tuscany

The hands that practise it have their capitals. Montelupo Fiorentino, in the province of Firenze, is the cradle of Tuscan maiolica: as early as the fifteenth century its workshops supplied the Medici and were exported all over Europe, and the decorative tradition of Montelupo — vivid colours, heraldic motifs, narrative scenes — is still a recognisable reference today. Sesto Fiorentino is home to the historic Manifattura di Doccia, founded by the Ginori in 1737, the first European factory of hard-paste porcelain after Meissen. Impruneta, also in the Firenze area, is the kingdom of terracotta (a distinct craft that deserves its own profile). Then there is Borgo San Lorenzo and its Liberty tradition, there are Cortona, Sansepolcro, Volterra with smaller but living traditions, and contemporary workshops in Pisa, Lucca and Siena that reinterpret ceramics as sculpture, as design, as an object of research.

A wooden turntable on the bench with a cloth of clay, ribs and loop tools, a sponge, an unfired pot and a jar of slip.

How

The techniques of the craft

The techniques define different families of ceramics. Maiolica is terracotta covered with an opaque white tin glaze, which receives the decoration in colour before the second firing. Earthenware is a finer, whitish body that produces light, hard-wearing tableware. Porcelain is the noblest — a hard paste fired at very high temperatures, translucent — and calls for special clays and precise technologies. Work at the wheel is the ancient gesture par excellence: clay turning and taking shape under wet hands is the simplest and most hypnotic film in the history of art. Decoration is done with slips, glazes, third firing and lustres, following procedures that every manufactory keeps in its own recipes.

A workshop with shelves loaded with bowls and pots, a potter at the wheel beside the window and a freshly thrown pot in the foreground.

Now

The craft today

Doing it today is a fine and difficult challenge. Ceramics has a market — above all as a domestic object, a gift, a piece of furnishing with an identity — but it competes with large retailers selling industrial ceramics at a tenth of the price. The real workshops hold on because they hold together tradition and the present: a dinner service in hand-decorated maiolica is worth what it says about the culture of a place, not what the tureen weighs. Much of the work goes into collaborations with designers, into personalisation, into small signed series.

The producers of this craft

Each one does it in their own way.

EVA MUN EVA MUNSan Niccolò, Firenze Il Papavero Decorazioni Il Papavero DecorazioniEmpoli, Firenze Kerstin Simply Creative Kerstin Simply CreativePietrapiana, Reggello, Firenze