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| The first urn is from the Cini Gallery in Venice |
I have never been to the ceramic museum of Montelupo Fiorentino. I would like to go sometime in the future as I have always been in love with their ceramics and now I have a story to tell.
Montelupo Fiorentino was considered as the furnace of Florence in times past. This is where the ceramic tradition started at the end of the 13th century and flourished in the Renaissance period. Montelupo's ceramic style is unmistakable and you can spot it immediately. You can see it a lot in stores in Orvieto, Siena and of course in Florence. Its patterns are very warm, colorful and the background glaze is off-white. They are rich in fruits, floral swirls, and leaves.
Many beautiful antique pieces from Montelupo Fiorentino are in museums in Italy and abroad. Last year I saw a couple of beautiful urns from the 16th century at the Cini Gallery in Venice. A similar urn was on display at an exhibition in Florence a few years before and I thought they look like belonging to the same batch. They actually did.
So in my mind, these three urns were together again for one day!
The reason why I do not visit museums or do things just for the sake of it is that I must have an important reason for doing things. What you read here that I am doing or writing about comes from real interactions with friends, contacts, and acquaintances whom I know in person or I have met on Facebook.
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| The second urn is from the Cini Gallery in Venice |
Interactions with others truly pique my interest and make my creativity come to life. I think it comes from the fact that the first thing I have learned as a little girl at my family's ceramic workshop was serving customers. If customers were not there, there was nothing for me to do except wrap things for them, paint or talk to the artists. I was still doing something for customers, however, my task was welcoming them at the factory. Well, of course in the beginning I was my father's assistant. I have learned to serve customers from my dad who is the sweetest man of all. I will always be thankful to him for teaching me the secrets to best serve our customers.
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| The third urn is from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence |
I have promised my father I will bring those days back in a different way. Whatever time it takes I had him promise on his turn to wait for the change to happen. He said he will live to be nearly 100 years old like our great-grandfather. So that gives me more time indeed. Thank you, Grazie!
So what happens is that these past years have given me the opportunity of interacting with my beloved customers on a different level: I am sharing the same interests in Italy with friends who are in love with Italy. It all started by accident and little by little I discovered that these friends are the same customers who visited our workshop. I could still interact with them by exchanging interests: Italian art, Italian cooking and everything beautiful there is in Italy. I can still meet them ideally outside the workshop and see them in action. Sometimes former customers visit me in Italy and that is the greatest gift of all: they are the famous, unique Friends of Cama.
The ceramic urns from the Cini Gallery collection and the urn with the Medici's coat of arms from the Uffizi Gallery (seen at the exhibition: L'Alchimia e le Arti, Florence, 2012) are part of an apothecary production setting the time of the pieces to the second half of the 16th century.
These ceramic containers were used to preserve farmaceutical medications often based on a sugar base. The three urns all look the same size as described in the exhibition catalog that I brought in Florence four years ago and related to the urn with the Medici coat of arms. Dimensions are: 33,5 cm high and 11,5 cm is the foot diameter which in inches is: 13 1/4" by 4 1/2" (foot diameter).
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