Impruneta and Terra-cotta, not just your ordinary clay pots!
Another beautiful day. Clouds and sun, temperatures in the low to
mid 70s and Demetria is driving the other two artists and me to the Masini Fornace Terrecotte in Impruneta
for a tour. This is a wonderful surprise
to me as years ago I used to be a potter and we’ll be touring a facility of
great history.
The town of Impruneta, north of Greve and just
south of Florence, has been known for 500 years as the center of the terracotta
craft. There are many groups creating terracotta here as well as around Italy
and other parts of the world, but the Masini workshop here in Impruneta is the
oldest and best and where Filippo Brunelleschi selected his clay and fired his
finished tiles for the dome of the Cattedrale
di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence – otherwise known as Il Duomo, begun
in 1296. As a potter once myself it was fascinating to watch today as their
work is not thrown on a wheel but built by hand using the most difficult method
of building up, the "coil method."
No moulds are used for the largest jars and pots, some of which must
weigh hundreds of pounds before and even after firing. To start a pot they rely on ages old drawings
and measurements. The process for the largest pots like the one below takes
weeks to complete. We actually watched
one craftsman putting the finishing touches on a very large pot. The clay used in Impruneta pots is mined from
quarries only found in this area and only the pots created in Impruneta can
have the Impruneta stamp on them. Right
from the earth it looks like a fine gray gravel. Only when fired does it take on the
characteristic rusty red color we're all used to seeing in terracotta pots. The
Massini terracotta is so durable it can withstand freezing, damp, scorching sun
without so much as cracking, but here in Italy people apparently never discard
an old pot. They just wire, wrap, drill, reconstruct around it to hold them
together if they should become damaged.
These take on even more character and appeals to my sense of never
throwing out anything beautiful.
The drive to and back from Impruneta was on
twisting, turning roads across what they refer to here as the hills of
Tuscany. To me they are small mountain
ranges, much like the southern edge of the Green or White mountains of New
Hampshire and Vermont. Everywhere you look are vineyards and olive tree
groves. All the homes, especially the
very old, are made of either local stone or finished with a pale yellow ochre
paint or stucco. I've not seen any
variation in this which makes building and designing a house a lot simpler.
This afternoon the jet lag I thought I'd
avoided finally set in. At the same time
so did the rain. So with this perfect
timing I decided to rest and return to more walking and sketching later.
This evening one of the other artists, the
writer Agnes Marton, gave a poetry reading.
Very interesting, lyrical and imaginative poetry. Agnes works for the courts in Luxumborg and
speaks/understands more languages than she can count. Wonderful fun with others
attending and a birthday party for another artist, a Korean painter studying in
London. This turns out to be the one
time I have seen, met and interacted with the other artists!
