G R O T TA G L I E
The Gallo of Grottaglie Ethel Mussen
40
“Fondato a 1624” declares the legend over the entrance to the ceramics workshop in the old city of Grottaglie. “Fasano Nicola” is the name above the date, the ancestor of the seven brothers who produce and sell maioliche or faience—tin-glazed earthenware—seen throughout Apulia. Grandfather Francesco introduced the saucy rooster image to his early dishes so diners would be able to have chicken on their plates every day of the year. It became a trademark of the workshop and the genre, and a pattern popular with the public—a jaunty center bordered by blue-dotted rosettes and a simple rim line. Now his grandson, Francesco, the padrone of the factory demonstrates his skill at the decorator’s bench for the visiting giornalistas. Deftly he stokes in the comb and tail feathers to the rotund body, then outlines the slim legs and feet, and lo, the gallo crows on the plate. The cock abounds here in the stacks of bowls and plates in his shop across the lane, and is also seen in the many ristorantes of Apulia that serve their cuisine on his tableware. Inside Francesco’s factory, he leads us to a potter’s wheel. He points to the photograph of his twenty-five-year-old self, turning a vase. “That was twenty-two years ago,” he boasts, stroking his stilldark hair. Just below the photo, we watch stocky Cosimo as he pedals the same wheel to hollow out an emerging pupa, one of the trademark figures of Grottaglie. The skirt swells and is decorated with a comb-like instrument to make a pattern; then the waistline is delineated, the bosom shaped. The graceful neck awaits a head, perhaps with a mustache to illustrate the tale of the local husband who resists his lord’s droit du seigneur of deflowering his virgin bride by presenting himself dressed in her costume, mustache and all. Across from Cosimo, Leonardo merrily completes a female horseman, as he dabs rosettes, a collar, hair pieces, and the horse’s tail into place. Someone asks
how many of these he completes each day, how long it takes to finish one. “Maybe three,” he tosses his head and smiles broadly. “I shouldn’t say here with the padrone...” Indeed, beside me Francesco bristles. “You should ask me the questions!” he protests. “How long did it take you to learn to do this, Leonardo?” “Since I was twelve, and I worked here summers, until after I left school and really studied. Then I came here.” After Francesco shows us the ancient wood-fired kiln carved out of the stone hill, we pass carts laden with trays of drying biscuit or unglazed clay plates and bowls and enter the
decorating room. here two men are mixing a pink glaze and dipping enormous garden planters into the liquid. I suspect this will fire to the sienna brown we associate with earthenware, since oxides burn into another hue. Enormous room-sized electric kilns are open, one awaiting its load of dried wares already separated by staggers, the other kiln partially emptied but still housing one towering load of rosy terra cotta, or cooked earthenware. It is cooling, ready to be dipped into glaze, dried, and decorated before returning to the kilns for the final firing. This is the normal routine for all maioliche and faience, spanning several days of waiting and processing. By another entry way sit two decorators. One is scraping the edge of a series of glazed dinner plates with a knife
so that the earth color show through like a brownish border. He brushes on a clear glaze to seal the porous clay. “Your glazes are lead-free—sensa piombo?” I ask. But of course, he reassures me it is a non-lead varnish. “We don’t use lead any more.” Below, to his right, a wide-eyed child of four sits solemnly at her own decorator’s desk. Clad in a plastic apron, she fills a round brush with bright pastel colors from a palette and blobs abstract patches of paint onto a salad dish. Claudio, her apparent mentor, interrupts his work to take a painted plate from her. Wordlessly, he hands her a blank and she intently applies her craft again. Claudio washes off the paints before they dry and puts the plate aside. “Does she know what you are doing?” I ask Claudio. “No,” he confides, “she thinks they are sold, and when there are no more left, she is happy that the shop has sold everything.” This is Francesco’s granddaughter, and I assume this is how all the children in Grottaglie were trained: by their fathers and the gentle artisans of their families’ respective workshops. I cross to Francesco’s great shop with its massive display of vases, garden pottery, and horsemen, male and female. Pupas are large and small, with and without mustaches, garments painted in blue on white. The next room overflows with tableware in colors and designs for every taste and holiday. Next to the traditional dishes with rosettes and blue lines, there are rectangular plates in cream with a red antler-like tree in the center. The next night, at a splendid dinner at the Masseria Cantone—a working farm turned glamourous inn outside the baroque city of Martina Franca—our table was set with the complete service of the plain creamy provincial pattern with its simple orange edge. A printed label on the back indicated that the manufacturer was Nicola Fasano at Grottaglie, Italy. Our hostess proudly identified the maker and then pointed out the collection of antique chargers mounted on the walls—all from Grottaglie, and all from Fasano, a family of talented artists and entrepreneurs whose art survives and thrives.