Ceramics in Pitigliano: The Story of a Workshop That Continues

In the historic centre of Pitigliano, there is a ceramics workshop that has been here since 1977.

Today, its three rooms are used as an exhibition and shop space. But it was not always this way.

The workshop began here, when Roberto Polidori started working as a ceramicist and opened his first workspace in the historic centre of Pitigliano. At first, it occupied just one of the three rooms that now make up the shop. Over time, the workshop grew and expanded into the other two rooms.

1979.

The photograph was taken here, at the historic location of the workshop, when this space was still also a place of production.

Today, production takes place in our workshop, while the shop remains in its historic location: the three rooms that now display our ceramics are the same rooms where the workshop began and where ceramics were made for many years.

And some traces of that past are still visible.

Beneath the exhibition rooms there is a cellar, originally built as a cistern for collecting water in Roman times and later used as a butto, a medieval disposal pit. When Roberto was still producing ceramics in the workshop, he used it to store clay.

In one of the rooms, the mouth of an old kiln is still visible. It remained in use until the end of the seventeenth century. The story of the kiln deserves a story of its own, though, so we will come back to it in a future article.

Today, production takes place in our workshop, but the shop is still here, in the same place where Roberto began working almost fifty years ago.