Vietri sul Mare is located on the Amalfi Coast of Italy and is known as the center of ceramics production. The town has a history of ceramics production dating back to the 15th century and was influenced by foreign potters in the early 20th century. Vietri is now home to many ceramic shops that line its narrow streets and continues the tradition through tiles, plates, vases, and other ceramic goods, especially decorative pieces featuring local motifs like fishermen, boats, and donkeys. The Museo della Ceramica di Vietri houses pieces that illustrate the history and development of Vietri's ceramic art.
Vietri sul Mare is located on the Amalfi Coast of Italy and is known as the center of ceramics production. The town has a history of ceramics production dating back to the 15th century and was influenced by foreign potters in the early 20th century. Vietri is now home to many ceramic shops that line its narrow streets and continues the tradition through tiles, plates, vases, and other ceramic goods, especially decorative pieces featuring local motifs like fishermen, boats, and donkeys. The Museo della Ceramica di Vietri houses pieces that illustrate the history and development of Vietri's ceramic art.
Vietri sul Mare is located on the Amalfi Coast of Italy and is known as the center of ceramics production. The town has a history of ceramics production dating back to the 15th century and was influenced by foreign potters in the early 20th century. Vietri is now home to many ceramic shops that line its narrow streets and continues the tradition through tiles, plates, vases, and other ceramic goods, especially decorative pieces featuring local motifs like fishermen, boats, and donkeys. The Museo della Ceramica di Vietri houses pieces that illustrate the history and development of Vietri's ceramic art.
Amal Coast and with its small churches with majolica-covered domes and the tile-covered houses, Vietri sul Mare seems suspended between heaven and earth. Founded by Etruscan, the town was later dominated by the Samnites, the Lucanians and nally by the Romans. The Chiesa di San Giovanni battista (#1 on the map), or St. John the Baptist, with its majestic dome and high bell tower, is located at the highest point of the old center of town and date back to the 17th century. Designed in late Renaissance style, it is famous for the cusp of the bell tower covered with painted pottery that also characterize the altars inside the church. Other interesting places for tourists in Vietri sul Mare are the churches scattered around the town and hamlets, like the
Chiesa di Santa Margherita di
Antiochia (#2), in Albori, and the Chiesa della Madonna delle Grazie (#3) in Benincasa. Also of interest, at the end of town in the direction of Salerno, is the Torre Crestarella (#4), an ancient watchtowers built as part of a surveillance system that stretched across the Amal Coast.. Also of interest is the Palazzo della Guardia (#5), near the Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista, a splendid example of Baroque art with majolica oors. Ceramics has a very old history in Vietri. In 899 there was a trade in vases and tableware from Amal and Salerno to Taranto and documents from the 15th century testify exports to other regions. Religious objects such as holy water fonts for houses and the votive tiles in the lanes and small streets from Marina di Vietri to Molina, Dragonea, Albori and Raito are from the 17th century.
Vietri is known for its ceramics
breast, the sun and the moon
and the characteristic donkey. But their production also had elements from their own culture. The classic themes in Delker and Kowaliska such as the panels showing Hector and Andromache, the mermaids' coast of Odysseus or the sweet face of the Madonna with Northern European colors and the multicolored nativity scenes of Hannasch. This is the so-called "German Period" which ended in 1947, not before it had changed the style completely and created
Vietri
Vietri
At the beginning of the 19th
century the town started producing kitchenware decorated with simple and oral motifs. Floor and wall tiles were also made at this time. The most fertile period from a creative point of view started in the 1920s when many foreign visitors, mostly German, came to work in the factories in Vietri. They expressed their art with the natural and human elements of the area: shermen and women by the pump, boats and the sea, babies at their mother's
1 Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista
2 Chiesa di Santa Margherita di Antiochia 3 Chiesa della Madonna delle Grazie 4 Torre Crestarella 5 Palazzo della Guardia 6 Museo della Ceramica di Vietri
Torre Crestarella
Vietri
Vietri 5
new shapes and decorations.
Vietri and the other coastal towns have become open-air museums with many ceramic shops to prove that the craft is still alive. The Museo della Ceramica di Vietri (#6), or Vietri Ceramic Museum is housed in the Torretta Belvedere, near Villa Guariglia, in the small town of Raito, high above Vietri. The museum shows the history of the art and business of ceramics. It is divided into three sections: a religious one, another reserved to the everyday objects and a German Period section. The ceramic shops of Vietri are a show within the show. The narrow streets that rise on the big terrace where the village
Torretta Belvedere
stands, are lined with small
shops and workshops with tiles, plates, holders, ashtrays, vases, gurines, tea and coee services, sacred objects and the famous donkeys, an invention of the German potters.