Campofranco

Campofranco is a small town in the interior of Sicily, a few kilometres from the Valley of the Temples at Agrigento - where the ancient Greeks built their greatest monuments on a ridge above the sea, and where the stone has been sitting in the light for two and a half thousand years. It is not a place that appears in most accounts of Italian design. Antonio and Giuseppe Bevilacqua grew up there, and it is where they still work.

Their mother was a painter. This matters more than it might seem. The brothers didn't come to ceramics through an apprenticeship in one of Sicily's established ceramic towns - not Caltagirone, not Santo Stefano di Camastra, though they drew from both traditions. They came through a household where looking carefully at things, and making things by hand, was simply what one did. When they founded their workshop in 1997, they were not restoring a family trade. They were starting something.

Sicilian ceramics carries a particular weight of imagery. The Moorish head - the Testa di Moro - is the most recognisable of it: a pair of ceramic busts, crowned and decorated, male and female, which have appeared on Sicilian windowsills and doorsteps for centuries. The legend behind them is characteristically Sicilian in its combination of beauty and violence. The objects themselves are, depending on how you encounter them, either deeply traditional or slightly surreal. The Bevilacqua heads are both - painted in the island's colours, adorned with fruit and flowers, with a presence that is somewhere between regal and strange.

But Antonio and Giuseppe are not simply restorers of tradition. Their geometric range - the Rombo vases, the Sfera, the Trapezio, the side tables and lamp bases - applies the same Sicilian palette and surface quality to forms that owe nothing to the past. The diamond-faceted surfaces, the deep terracotta grounds with their geometric reliefs, the way the colour sits differently in the recesses than on the raised planes: these are not folk craft objects. They are design objects made by people who understand both what the tradition contains and what it doesn't need to contain.

In 2022, Antonio and Giuseppe were awarded the title of Maestro d'Arte e Mestiere by the Fondazione Cologni - a recognition given to Italian craftspeople who have achieved a level of mastery worth preserving. Dolce & Gabbana, who have spent years finding in Sicily the kind of visual excess and seriousness that they put into their work, have collaborated with them. Neither fact changes what the objects are. They are made by hand, in a workshop in Campofranco, by two brothers who learned to look carefully from their mother.

The Leopard stocks Ceramica Bevilacqua exclusively in Australia. 

Ceramica Bevilacqua was founded in 1997 by brothers Antonio and Giuseppe Bevilacqua in Campofranco, Sicily. Every piece is made by hand in their workshop.