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Five Generations of Potters, From Sicily to Montelupo Fiorentino
La Galleria is our family ceramic workshop, in the historic center of Montelupo Fiorentino, twenty minutes from Florence by train. My family has been making ceramics for five generations, but the story does not begin in Tuscany. It begins in Sicily, in Santo Stefano di Camastra, a small town on the northern coast where ceramics has been a trade for centuries and where some of my relatives still work the clay today.
My grandfather Sebastiano Mirenda was a potter there. In the 1960s he left, like many Sicilians of his generation, looking for work and a future in the north. He could have stopped anywhere, but he chose Montelupo Fiorentino, and the choice was not random. Montelupo has been producing ceramics since the fourteenth century — its kilns once supplied the Medici court, and its majolica traveled across Europe for seven hundred years. For a Sicilian potter looking for a place to start over, there were not many towns in Italy where the work he already knew how to do was the same work the town had been doing for centuries.
Sebastiano, Salvatore, and the Wheel
Sebastiano was a master potter. He worked the wheel until the end, and he passed everything he knew to his son — my father, Salvatore Mirenda, that now has been at the wheel for fifty years. He learned from Sebastiano as a boy and never stopped. In Montelupo, where ceramics has been a craft for centuries, Salvatore is recognized as one of the finest wheel-throwers in town. There is no certificate that says this, it is something people in the trade know by watching him work.
When you come for a workshop, you sit at the wheel next to my father. Salvatore has been doing this for fifty years and he still teaches every session himself — he has never delegated it to anyone..
Tradition Is Not Repetition
There is a misconception about traditional crafts: that the work is to copy what came before. We do not see it that way. Tradition, for us, is the foundation — the technique, the material knowledge, the patience, the respect for what the hands can do that no machine can replicate. But tradition is alive only if it keeps producing new things.
So we experiment constantly. We try new shapes, new decorations, new uses for ceramic that no one in the family had ever considered. A few years ago, I designed and presented a wireless phone charger made entirely of ceramic at the ICFF design fair in New York — the first of its kind. It started as a question: what happens if you take a material that has been used for seven hundred years to make plates and vases, and ask it to do something it has never done before? The answer was not in any book. We had to find it ourselves.
That spirit — looking for new forms, new decorations, new functions, while working with the same clay and the same techniques our family has used for generations — is what keeps the bottega alive. It is what we mean when we say La Galleria is a workshop, not a museum.
The Fifth Generation: Matteo and Marco
I am Matteo Mirenda, the known fifth generation of our family to work in ceramics, and I run La Galleria with my brother Marco. We grew up in the workshop, between the wheel and the kilns, and we made the choice — which is not an obvious one for our generation — to stay.
Staying meant building something that could survive the next thirty years, not just the next thirty months. We took La Galleria from a small studio to a workshop that ships to clients across the world, produces for brands in the United States, and welcomes travelers from every continent into the bottega for hands-on experiences. In 2025, our ceramic experience was awarded Airbnb Best Experience in Italy, an honor that meant a great deal to us — not for the prize itself, but because it confirmed that what we are trying to do is being recognized by the people we are trying to reach.
I also serve as President of CNA Toscana Ceramisti, the regional association of Tuscan ceramic artisans. It is a role I take seriously, because the future of this craft depends on whether the next generation has reasons to choose it.
Where We Are Today
La Galleria sits at Corso Garibaldi 74, in the historic center of Montelupo Fiorentino. We moved here a few years ago, taking over a long-empty storefront in the heart of the town. It was a deliberate choice — a bet on the historic center at a moment when most artisans were leaving it.
Today the workshop is open to visitors who want to see how ceramics is really made, take part in a hands-on experience at the wheel, commission custom pieces, or simply spend an hour in a place where five generations of work are visible in the walls, the shelves, and the hands of the people who work here.
We are easy to find, easy to reach by train from Florence, and genuinely glad when someone makes the trip.
Hope to see you soon in Montelupo.