We’ve spent time in Ferrara, a complex city of bicycles, memories of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and the historic crown jewel of the Este family. But the Estes were originally from this small town named for them in the Veneto.
Their castle grounds are now a public park, where the sweet scent of roses hits you from yards away as you enter. The Museo Nazionale Atestino, a spectacular archeological collection, too, is on these grounds. I know many people glaze over in the endless archeological museums in Italy (Ed often is ahead of me, checking his phone), but I fall into a trance when looking at the safety pins, tweezers, cooking pots, and jewelry of ancient people. They were like us. I like the skeleton from 900 B.C. She’s wearing hoop earrings. She was just shy of five feet tall. Double hoop earrings. Yes, like us, and so long ago.
Este is the home of a graceful oval duomo, with a Tiepolo painting of Santa Thecla freeing Este from the 1630 plague. A run-down villa faces the duomo courtyard (awaiting an inspired restoration); and a path up leads to a dark wooden Alpine-style villa where poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron, visited. I’m smitten with the town’s clock tower, its blue, star-spangled face. Ed favors the bar Al Canton, tiny, with black-trimmed forties wood paneling and nautilus-shaped lights they’ll never be able to replace. There, we have a perfect espresso and tell the barista that Carlo Scarpa would have loved the place. He agrees. Italy: where the barista knows who Carlo Scarpa is.
SETTING PLACES FOR dinner gives me as much happiness as cooking—what’s on the table being the complement to what’s served. In the early years of our Italian travels, I began to buy a bowl or platter in towns with a history of ceramic design. I like taking down the lemon platter and thinking of Sicily. The rooster pitcher reminds me of Orvieto. And we have Cortona’s eighteenth-century yellow pattern with a sunflower in the middle. How many broken pieces of that have I dug up in my garden? I abandoned the collecting because I ran out of space, but I’m still drawn to traditional patterns, curious about how they speak of the history of the town. In that spirit, we follow a sign beside the Duomo: Este Ceramiche. We find a SPACE (outlet) sign at the end of the street along a canal but the door is locked. From the other side of the street, a young woman, who seems to glow with energy, leans out of a doorway. She will open the shop for us.
Immediately we see that this is not typical majolica. Este Ceramiche Porcellane’s designs are refined and exquisite. Since 1780, production has continued on this spot, with the canal once transporting the wares to Venice and Padua. Dior, Tiffany, Bergdorf Goodman—the marks on the bottoms of the seconds show the clientele. The items are totally reasonable in price. I buy several gifts and a—where will I put it?—platter for Bramasole. By now we’ve had a lovely conversation with Isabelle Fadigati, daughter of the store’s owner. She invites us over to meet her father and to see the workshop, where the hand painting is in progress.
What a trove. A trionfo is a historic centerpiece for a grand table. They’re still made here. Tall, extravagant, with vase shapes, piled porcelain fruit, little baskets and other removable parts dangling, they’re often found on palace tables. I admire other objects, too, such as boxwood urns and grape-topped tureens. Anyone with a passion for china has to swoon over the dinnerware patterns—florals based on historic designs, charming hunt scenes, African animals, grape clusters and vines, and paste-white dishes with monograms or insignias. I like the playful plates with trompe-l’oeil ceramic fruits, olives, vegetables, or candies attached. These are said to have once signaled that a dinner had finished. Some of us need to be placed in restraints at this point. Time to go!
NOTE:
Nearby Nove, another historic ceramic center, has the Museo della Ceramica in Palazzo De Fabris, plus workshops around town.