A puff of clay

Situated at the foot of Mount Camicia, at 500 metres of altitude, Castelli is a small village well-known all over the world for its fine ceramic production. According to the opinion of many scholars this activity was first carried out around the twelfth century by the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of St Salvatore, located upstream of the present-day town, with the promotion of the first pottery productions of everyday tableware thanks to the use of local clay, of which the surrounding territory is rich. The abundance of additional raw materials necessary for production, such as beech wood for firing and the deposits of minerals and silica for the creation of enamels, favoured the development of the artisan workshops and the progressive refinement of the techniques and decorative styles.

Vincenzo Di Simone is an expert ceramist, who grew up together with the old master craftsmen, learning in the workshops the practice of traditional crafts; an expert in forming techniques, he has always produced his own enamels and paints, with which his son Antonio does the decorations. A passionate clay modeller, in spare moments after fulfilling the orders of his established majolica production business, Vincenzo began to produce whistles and characters from the nativity scene, from the most classic to those coming to life from his imagination, from the inspiration he received from the environment, from memories, from “well-being”, defined by himself as that particular creative condition from which his statuettes take shape. Fantastic, imaginary or domestic birds, mountain or exotic animals, legendary beasts and shepherds, pipers and Bersaglieri (riflemen), typical figures of the fable or historical tale, thus become the protagonists of his world, created in a showroom at the bottom of the workshop.

After a trip to Egypt, among mysterious bas-reliefs, colossal sculptures and breathtaking architecture, Vincenzo also began to model pharaohs and figures of ancient statuary, captivated by “another world”. This is how Castelli variants of Ramses II or kneeling court dignitaries are welcomed among the increasingly populated collection of whistles, which range from the original cockerels and birds to figures from the furthest depths of Mediterranean history.

Each whistle has a sound and a “voice”, which corresponds to an intimate connection with the creative idea that generated it. Vincenzo Di Simone blows into each one of them and says that they came out as he “felt” them, “in one go”, suddenly. And the “breath” of the moulded and baked clay is indeed, somehow, the soul of the object, just as the vital breath of ancient mythologies and sacred history is what makes inert matter come alive, populating the planet with men, animals and plants. Whether the sound is shrill or deep, acute or guttural, it makes the whistle a sound emblem and a creature of the “threshold”, an instrument that in the popular culture has also assumed magical qualities and the function of psychopomp, a bridge between different dimensions, between visible and invisible realms, between the living and the dead, between darkness and light, or vice versa, between the luminous certainty of real life and the impalpable and impenetrable destination of an afterlife that is different from anything imaginable.

However, at Castelli, an elementary and miniaturized prototype of the whistle, almost a tooth or a tiny bone, pierced with a needle, had a completely different and more earthly function: it was the “thrush” whistle of the amorous encounters which, with its subtle hiss, signalled to the woman the hidden presence of her suitor (“the blackbird”) near the fountain, when she went daily to get water with the conca (traditional copper vessel )