Grottaglie: in Puglia

Grottaglie is 27 Kms far from Ostuni and it is the lovers of the ceramics city.

The ceramics in Grottaglie (edited by Giusy Fornaro)

That form that changes under the skilled hands of the artisan has some magic.
The wet earth allows to be dominate, to be mould, following the movements of an ancient dance.
Go up from the lathe, being forget in different forms, always and in whatever way different, like the gestures of an artist that creates them. The creative gesture is infinitely repeats in the ancient artisan shops, born centuries ago in the tuffaceous stone, in the ancient swamp where the District of the Ceramics rises, to the feet of the medieval castle in Grottaglie, testimony of the history and the past, where it has been existing for centuries and where the ancient handicraft activity still proliferates today.

Grottaglie: the District of the Ceramics

An unique place in Italy, being the only one that if proof of a continuity in the time of the ceramic production, and this distinguishes it from the other 25 ceramic centres recognized by the Italian Parliament and protected from the mark D.O.C.
Grottaglie is the only centre in Puglia to have received such recognition.
In Grottaglie, indeed, there are over 50 shops and studies spread to a large extent along the suggestive District, which hosts, besides, two annual exhibitions of a certain interest:

• The Show of the Ceramics in August;
• The Show of the Crib in December;

The Museum of the Ceramics

Besides, from a few years, in the southeast wing of the castle Episcopio, a Museum of the Ceramics has been build. It hosts permanently around 300 manufactured articles of the local "figulina" production, coming from public and private collections.
They are prepared according to a chronological run that goes from the XVII° century to the first half of the XX° century and that concerns both the "rustic" production or popular and ornamental one, cultured and refined.
The Meseum of the Ceramics is born from the demand to reconstruct the history of the Grottaglie ceramic art through the exchanges and influences intervened in the centuries with the other civilizations.