«Our history and our values are the competitive factor of extraordinary importance thanks to which today, following almost 150 years, we are world-class in the field of ceramic tiles. And on the market there is a very strong demand for attention to history.” These words from the leaders of Confindustria Ceramica are the most effective introduction to explain why the headquarters of the industrial association, the Palazzina della Casiglia di Sassuolo, was chosen to present the exhibition which will be inaugurated next Saturday 20 April in the Castello di Spezzano (Fiorano Modenese), where the Ceramics Museum has been housed since 1996: “Tiles when small. 1889-1939: the first fifty years of the District”.
An exhibition that sheds light on the dawn of industrial ceramic production in the Modena-Reggio Emilia district, highlighting the Medici Collection: a heritage of over 7 thousand pieces donated in recent months to the Municipality of Fiorano by the family members of Antonio Medici, a collector who passed away in 2021.
A leading manufacturing district in the world
It is difficult to establish a boundary between what is art and what is industry, between the family and the factory when moving in the Sassuolo district, the epicenter of a tricolor manufacturing that maintains a firm leadership in world trade, whether we are talking regarding technologies for ceramic or tile. Two links in a supply chain that has always set a precedent in the world for innovation and quality and is synonymous with the economic and social well-being of the territory, closed within a radius of a few tens of kilometres: Acimac, the association of ceramic machinery and equipment manufacturers with its 137 companies, 7,300 employees and 2.3 billion euros in turnover, of which over 1.7 billion in exports; Confindustria Ceramica boasts a network of 128 tile manufacturing companies that employ almost 20 thousand people and export over 80% of their products, over 6 billion in exports out of 7 in total sales.
The year zero of industrial processes: 1889
1889 can be taken as the ideal date of birth of the industrial production of Sassuolo tiles because in that year at the Exhibition of the Industrial Artistic Museum of Rome, instead of the usual ornamental ceramics, “a sample of dry-pressed majolica tiles” was presented. The exhibition will give an account of this and the subsequent steps, offering more than one hundred representative pieces of the first industrial ceramics, of the design of the time, of the settings reconstructed or found in the homes of the district, of the precious decorations. And once more, the first companies, the productive and personal stories of the pioneers who created the district, names like Rubbiani, Carani, Rizzi, Olivari, Siliprandi, Marazzi.
«What happened in the first decades of life of the Modena-Reggio ceramic industry, from the end of the 19th century to the outbreak of the Second World War, has never been adequately explored. A vacuum has been created which seems to have authorized many to believe that suddenly, as if “by a miracle”, starting from the 1950s and 60s, tiles began to be produced in large quantities by the hundreds of small and large local industries that sprung up in the in the meantime”, explain the curators of the exhibition, proposed by the Municipality of Fiorano Modenese and the Ceramics Museum in collaboration with Confindustria Ceramica, Acimac, Società Ceramica Italiana and the support of Ceramiche Marca Corona, with the contribution of Marazzi Group for scientific research.
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2024-04-07 13:15:35
