6 October 2015
The Paravicini ceramics workshop is located in the courtyard of a building in the historic center of Milan, at no. 8 Via Nerino, just a few steps from the busy shopping street of Via Torino. A world apart: here, for around 20 years, Costanza Paravicini has been painting decorations by hand and producing designs for silkscreening onto fine ceramic dishes. Handcrafted ornaments that are rare today, owing to their cost and to the skill and time required, but that make it possible, in a world which is ever more standardized in the range of products on offer, to obtain unique and customized services, on commission. The work is complicated. The shapes of the dishes—in their various versions, soup plate, shallow plate, fruit bowl, serving dish, table plate—have been designed by the manufacturer and are produced with their own molds. So the choice has shifted from the form of the service to that of the decoration, which is applied to the dish in the biscuit state, i.e. when it has been fired a first time at 900-950° C, and then dipped in a bath of glaze before being fired again at 900°. For those who choose a gilt decoration a third firing is needed, called terzo fuoco in Italian, which increases the cost, and not just because of the precious metal used. Independently of the way the decoration is executed—painted by hand, with the application of transfers for silkscreen printing or by means of digital printing processes—the starting point is always a drawing done by hand with underglaze. This is what bestows a character of slight imperfection on the decoration, almost a smudging, that is of particular charm, in addition to ensuring that the motifs and the nontoxic and indelible colors are not damaged by the dishwasher or the blade of the knife. What are the motifs? They range from simple monograms to family crests, floral patterns and designs inspired by a variety of themes: Asia, vintage cars, animals, signs of the Zodiac, stripes and abstract or contemporary figures. A color can also be added for the background. The workshop’s customers include young and not so young couples, people with a passion for dining and table settings, collectors and decorators, Italians and foreigners. Although she has recently been joined by her daughter, Costanza Paravicini will in the future have to make the decision, with regard to production, image and publicity, whether to risk a change of scale, offering more collections in parallel to the services made to order—like the one presented last April dedicated to the painter Vittore Frattini.
