![]() Many of the ceramicists you see throwing pots and painting designs in the shops that cover the town are there just for show. There is tremendous variety in quality and quantity of production among the artisans of Caltagirone. Realize that you’re only seeing a fraction of the town’s production.Many ceramics studios are located along this main artery and on side streets branching from it. When you’re ready to hit the town, browse your way from the museum to the impressive grand stairway in the center of town, paved with colorful tiles.This small but nicely displayed collection chronicles the history of ceramic production in the Caltagirone region from the seventeenth century BCE through the nineteenth century CE. If you’re serious about ceramics, plan to spend some time here training your eye with the traditional colors and forms of Caltagirone. Make the ceramics museum your first stop.The best way to work the town is to park along the Via Roma as you enter the town coming from Catania.Here are a few tips to help you navigate the experience: More than a hundred ceramic studios make their home in Caltagirone, and a ceramics shopping excursion can prove overwhelming. More modern inventions include planters and lamps. The most traditional forms include lidded pharmacy jars decorated with saints and nobles ancient-looking amphorae plates with vegetal motifs tiles painted with fruit and animals heads of queens and kings and decorative forms like pinecones. ![]() As you stroll the town’s narrow streets, crowned heads of queens and kings peer out at you from shop windows, along with traditional depictions of Moors, recalling Sicily’s history. Caltagirone is also known for large jars in the shape of human heads, popular in the nineteenth century. Today, most of the artisans crafting ceramics in Caltagirone reproduce pieces from the town’s heyday, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The distinctive Caltagirone style of ceramics is characterized by a white background and limited color palette, focused on bright blues, greens, and yellows. But it’s in Caltagirone, with its famous seventeenth-century ceramic staircase, the Scala di Santa Maria del Monte, that these colorfully decorated wares are most closely associated with the spirit of the place itself. The towns of Santo Stefano di Camastra and Monreale, just outside Palermo, also boast important and distinct ceramics traditions of their own. Today, ceramics are made and sold all over Sicily. Instead, you’ll find bold patterns, bright colors, and brash, splashy decorations that capture the vigorous Sicilian spirit. On Sicily, you won’t find the refined Renaissance elegance so embodied by pieces from the ceramics towns of central Italy, such as Deruta and Faenza. The term “maiolica” refers to earthenware painted with tin oxide glazing enamels before firing at a low temperature to reach a reflective, hard finish. These early artists left their masterpieces to bake in the hot Sicilian sun, and then left them behind, where they continue to inspire Sicily’s artisans today. ![]() The technique of laying bright, saturated colors against a white tin oxide background developed in the Middle Ages, and may have been introduced into Sicily during the Muslim conquest of the ninth through the eleventh centuries. The ancient Phoenicians and Greeks brought their artisanal traditions to the island, creating amphorae, kraters, kylixes, and other typical ancient wares using the ruddy earth and painted with styled black and red figures. On Sicily, ceramic art is deeply rooted in time. This pottery exudes a sense of warmth and cheer that feel as if they could only exist on Sicily. The designs are bold and brash, with a palette dominated by blues, greens and yellows and big, bold designs. Today, Caltagirone is the center of an uncomplicated, exuberant ceramics tradition. The word Caltagirone itself derives from the Arabic phrase Qal’at al Ghiran, or Rock of the Vases, which, according to legend, is the name its medieval inhabitants gave it. For two millennia, the clay has meant a living for the people of Caltagirone. Take one look at the landscape around Caltagirone, and you’ll understand why ceramics became the destiny of this hilltop town. When the heat reaches toward triple digits Fahrenheit on a typical summer afternoon, the dozens of Caltagirone’s artisans retreat beneath the awnings of their shops, quietly painting colorful designs on ceramic pots, waiting for the town to come alive again as the sun goes down. Scrubby plants and olive trees eke out their existence in the sand-colored earth, along with the hardy residents of this town. The hilltop village of Caltagirone rises like a mirage above the parched landscape of central Sicily.
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