Grottaglie: Where Puglia's Hand-Painted Ceramics Are Made

Spend a few nights in a Puglian masseria and you start to notice the same hands at work — the glazed bowls, the painted tiles set into a stair, the plate your breakfast arrives on. A great many of them come from a single town in the hills above Taranto called Grottaglie, which has been making pottery for something like a thousand years and shows no sign of stopping. Vista Ostuni had its tiles made there; it's the source the region's designers reach for first. Skip the mass-produced "Puglia" ceramics in the coastal gift shops — the real thing is here, thrown and painted by the family whose name is on the base.

The place to go is the Quartiere delle Ceramiche, the Ceramics Quarter — a steep warren of lanes on the edge of the old town where the workshops are dug partly into the rock. There are roughly fifty of them, kilns going, finished pieces stacked in the doorways and drying in the sun, and the craft renews itself rather than fossilizes: the town's Istituto Statale d'Arte, one of the oldest art schools in Italy, still trains its master potters, so there are young hands at the wheels as well as old ones.

Two traditions run side by side here. The caposanara made the useful things — the big storage jars, the capasa a Grottaglie family takes its everyday plates from — while the faenzara made the decorative pieces, glazed in the town's palette of manganese brown, ochre, blue and green. The object to learn is the pumo: a bud- or pinecone-shaped glazed finial, said to bring luck and fertility, which you'll see in every color on every windowsill — and, once you've clocked it, on the rooftops of half of Puglia.

A few names to look for. The Fasano family is the dynasty: Ceramiche Nicola Fasano, whose work carries the stamped initials CNF, is the best known, its pieces running from simple stamped terracotta to the bold, collectible designs that design shops abroad fight over; relatives including Antonio and Cinzia Fasano keep their own studios nearby. Up the hill on Via Santa Sofia, Bottega Vestita is one of the loveliest workshops in town — the Vestita family will sometimes show visitors the Roman floors they uncovered while renovating their house. There are forty-odd others, and the real pleasure is wandering in and out of open doorways until something stops you.

At the top of the quarter, inside the castle, the town's ceramics museum holds pieces back to the days of Magna Graecia — a good half-hour on why the plate in your hand looks the way it does.

If you go. Grottaglie is about thirty to forty minutes from the Valle d'Itria masserie and from Manduria — an easy half-day out from most of the hotels in this guide. Go on a weekday morning, when the workshops are open and the light in the lanes is good; bring cash, and don't try to wrestle the big platter into your hand luggage — the serious botteghe will pack and ship. Buy the pumo anyway. It travels well, and it will mean more on your windowsill at home than any fridge magnet.