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Pottery and Majolica:
Deruta
has been famous for the manufacture of Artistic
Majolica for more than seven centuries. Majolica
is part of the great
family of Ceramics. In
order to understand the significance of Majolica,
we must first clarify what is meant by Ceramics.
By Ceramics we mean any
product composed essentially of solid, non-metallic inorganic
material, cold-moulded and strengthened by heat. The range of solid
inorganic material is very wide, but we will look at the mixtures
based on plastic earthy
material. Earth is
the determining element that mankind has always used to satisfy
their most varied needs throughout their history. Earth,
or rather the CLAYS,
together with the KAOLINS,
are the fundamental raw materials of Ceramics.
An essential property of CLAY
is its PLASTICITY, that
is to say the property of being moulded into shapes relatively
easily. DERUTA in part owes its copious output of Majolica to the fact that its foundations are laid on extensive
deposits of CLAY, which
meant that our forebears found it easy to obtain the basic raw
material.
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