By Ines Keane
A town whose name may mean “castle of pottery jars” has a staircase whose every riser is a tile.
Wikipedia places Caltagirone in Sicily, in the Metropolitan City of Catania, about 70 kilometres southwest of Catania itself, with a population of 38,391 on 30 June 2017. It says the name derives from the Arabic qalʿat al-jirār, “castle of pottery jars”, which the article takes as evidence of an old pottery tradition and Arab influence before the year 1000. It adds that the town was a renowned ceramics centre through the Norman, Hohenstaufen and Aragonese periods. The etymology is one article’s account, and we have not seen a linguistic source.
The staircase
The Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte has 142 steps in the town article. The staircase article agrees on 142 and says the original had rest areas and a total of 150 steps. The sources differ on the start: the town article says built from 1608, the staircase article says 1606 and a decade to complete. We are not choosing between them.
The staircase article says that since 1954 the steps leading to the church have been entirely decorated with polychrome ceramic tiles, in Arab, Norman, Angevin-Aragonese, Spanish, Renaissance, Baroque, eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century and contemporary styles. Older designs are at the bottom and newer ones at the top. Wikipedia says the tiles reflect the city’s pottery traditions. We have not walked the steps for this piece and cannot confirm the arrangement.
Lamps on the steps
The town article says once a year, around 25 July, the patron saint’s day, the staircase is lit with candles of different colours. The staircase article is more detailed. It says La Scala Illuminata takes place on 24 and 25 July and on 14 and 15 August, with 4,000 oil lamps. The two accounts differ on dates and on candles against oil lamps, and we have not seen a municipal announcement. Check with the town before you plan around it.
Maiolica
Wikipedia’s article on maiolica defines it as tin-glazed pottery decorated in colours on a white background. Tin oxide gives the opaque white surface. Colours go on as metallic oxides or fritted underglazes onto the unfired glaze, which absorbs them as plaster absorbs fresco pigment. The article says the term probably derives from Mallorca, an island on the shipping route for Hispano-Moresque wares from Valencia to Italy, and gives an alternative from the Spanish for work from Málaga.
On Sicily, the same article says Moorish potters from Mallorca reportedly worked there, and their wares may have reached mainland Italy by way of Caltagirone. It says maiolica was made as far south as Palermo and Caltagirone. The word reportedly matters, and we have not found a source that confirms those potters or that route. The article names Faenza, Deruta, Urbino and Montelupo Fiorentino as the main production centres on the mainland.
The museum, and the designation
Wikipedia says the Museum of Pottery was established in 1965 and holds ancient and modern pottery from the Magna Graecia period onwards. We have not confirmed its hours or current display. It also says Caltagirone is part of the “Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto” World Heritage listing of 2002, with a core zone of 22.9 hectares and a buffer zone of 47.86 hectares. We have not read the UNESCO file.
Visiting
We have not confirmed which workshops or showrooms in Caltagirone welcome visitors, and we are not naming one. For the staircase, go in daylight to see the tiles, and consider an evening in July or August if the lamps are lit that year.
What to ask
Ask who made the piece and whether the decoration was painted by hand or transferred. Ask what the clay is, how many firings the piece had, and what the glaze is. Ask whether the piece is meant for the table or for the wall, because our sources do not say. Ask how it should be washed.
We are not naming a workshop. We have not sourced one for this piece.
Roam first. Shop later.
Caltagirone makers can find out what’s involved at /sell-with-sephari/