The exhibition space is right in front of the entrance to the Monterozzi Necropolis, but it is in the workshop located in the artisan area that Marco Bocchio creates his imitation ceramics, with a predilection for Etruscan-Corinthian and Attic-style manufacture. Self-taught, he has acquired a profound knowledge of techniques and great skill in decoration, which he does strictly by hand. All of this serves as an indispensable background for the execution of such complex work. Bocchio creates the colours himself.

The Etruscan ceramic tradition, as well as that of the Greek and Roman periods, inspires this craftsman, who was already modelling clay at the age of eight, to create works in the Villanovan style. Massimo Bordo can display a vast repertoire, revealing great passion for ceramics and knowledge. He makes his working tools by hand, particularly those he uses to decorate his pieces.

Intimately linked to classical culture, he nevertheless experiments with new techniques and reworks forms and decorative motifs from the past in a contemporary key.

His studio is a timeless place, a peaceful oasis in the medieval village where the ceramic art of the Etruscans lives in symbiosis with contemporary works moulded to emanate profound and absolute messages. A veteran among the ceramists of Tarquinia, Calandrini looks at the world with the pure eyes of a child but expresses, with remarkable creative ability and great mastery of manipulative techniques, the mature awareness of one who, man and artist, intends to carry out a strong work of introspection aimed at discovering the human essence in its becoming.

An architect and teacher, in 2018 he opened the ANSER atelier, where he works as a ceramist in conjunction with running courses for children and adults. The artistic workshop uses mainly red clay and white clay. Many diverse techniques that draw on local traditions are used: from Greek-Etruscan style pottery, to Renaissance majolica, to the use of glazes for finishing sculptures and objects. Particular attention is paid to the production of Etruscan-inspired objects interpreted in a contemporary key.

After graduating from the Art Institute, he discovered his passion for clay modelling and vase painting at a very young age. Since 1982, he has fully dedicated himself to the profession of ceramist, specialising in the use of the potter’s wheel and the reproduction of ancient decorative forms and techniques. His studio, located in one of the towers of the Palazzo dei Priori, exhibits a large repertoire of Etruscan-style bucchero objects and black-figure ceramics depicting floral and animal friezes, in Corinthian style, or mythological scenes of Attic inspiration.

Born in Tarquinia in 1952, he graduated in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome with Alberto Ziveri. Driven by the need to acquire new modes of expression, he experimented with different artistic languages and techniques such as drawing and bronze and terracotta sculpture. He delved into ancient Etruscan techniques, in particular the use of haematite, an iron oxide that he extracted from rainwater deposits in the area and that, combined with oxygen reduction and bucchero firing, gives his works unique ochre and brown to black tones.

A Belgian psychotherapist, she came to Tarquinia in 2014 as a traveller. Here she found a new home and discovered a new way of exploring human interiority through the manipulation of clay.

Her intimate, delicate leaf-shaped sculptures express the principles of beauty, harmony and purity inherent in nature. In them, light is transformed into vital energy, and this same energy is revealed in the changing colours of Nicky Peetermans’ terracotta and watercolour works which mirror our emotions.

A student of English painter Brian Mobbs, in the 1990s she ventured into the figurative arts until she came to work with Etruscan imitation ceramics.

Today, she is a full-time ceramist, combining production in the antique style with a desire to play with original shapes and innovative techniques. In particular, she loves to use the raku technique, so unpredictable in the rendering of glazes and colours, which she uses in the creation of jewellery and so-called ‘scatole‘, highly imaginative three-dimensional creations inspired by the world of theatre and imagination.

The two brothers are the owners of a craft enterprise, Todini Sculture, which excels in the field of stone-working and, at the same time, can boast the ‘origine e qualità dell’artigianato artistico e tradizionale‘ label issued by the Lazio Region for the quality of its ceramic artefacts, mainly sculptures and panels decorated with multi-coloured enamels.

For Roberto and Stefano, ‘ceramic work is, together with drawing, the basis of an art workshop’.

In his workshop, Antiche Tradizioni, located right next to the Monterozzi Necropolis, he ‘tells the story’ of the Etruscans through ceramics. It was his father, from whom he learned the use of the hand potter’s wheel, who passed on to him the passion for this art. Even today, the objects created by the craftsman Michele Totino are shaped on the potter’s wheel, just as the entire production cycle is manual. Ancient techniques are also used for decoration, for which the craftsman prepares the colour by decanting the clay.

A Roman who has lived and worked in Tarquinia for more than forty years expressing his primary art as a sculptor and as a painter.

His works stand out for their marked richness of styles, from the classical to the contemporary, his authentic art form that elevates visitor’s thoughts to Heaven and Infinity, and for the wide variety of materials used, which is the result of incessant experimentation. His studio is a permanent exhibition open to the public.

The statue of winged horses in the roundabout at the entrance to Tarquinia is also his.