Manuela and I visited the exhibition last week. We had already read the catalogue, so we thought we were more or less prepared for the works we were about to see.

Indeed, we were not.

We did not expect such a complete involvement of all our senses. We stepped behind the curtain that marks the entrance of the gallery and we entered a different dimension altogether. Dark rooms with vaulted brick ceilings, soft music, intriguing lights spotting the works and the installations.

Under the spell of the sounds and the lights, we tiptoed to an old shelving were potter’s tools keep good company to some eye catching pieces made by Lucia Angeloni and lustered by Maurizio Tittarelli Rubboli. A striking example of the fertile cooperation between the two artists. 
We couldn’t help holding our breath in front of a great interpretation of the Brocca dei Ceri.

Then we moved to the main room. It was hard to decide what to look at first. On the right Lucia’s works: large bowls and plates made with tiny strips of clay. A painstaking hand work, where each and every strip is uniquely made and decorated and all the strips together make the final form, that sometimes is dynamically related to its container, a plate.

“Diary” is the intimate report of the artist’s life. It’s a large panel with 47 ceramic sheets arranged in 4 lines. Each sheet tells the story of one year: drama and laughter, sadness and excitement, peaks and valleys… the panel vibrations are infinite, just like the emotions of a lifetime.

On the left Maurizio Tittarelli Rubboli’s installations forced us to kneel down. A simple, yet symbolic gesture.

Set on the gallery floor 5 old doors host the artist’s works. They come from the ancient “bottega” of the artist’s family, Rubboli. Old, rugged, dear objects, where time and history left their marks, have been chosen to display sets of identically shaped objects, differing in the colors and in the unpredictable impact of the third firing on their surface.

We knelt in wonder in front of the vases, the candle holders, the bowls, the enigmatic frogs. Even more so facing the “burning-glasses”, large, deep bowls inspired by Archimedes’ heat rays. Still suspended between myth and reality, the burning-glasses were invented by Archimedes to focus sunlight on approaching enemy ships, causing them to catch fire.

If it were not for our children, who were waiting for us in the heavy rain of an end of Summer day, we would have lingered a little longer, absorbing more of the details that never ceased to unfold to our senses.

Galleria della Porta
Corso Garibaldi, Gubbio
Hours: Tue-Sun 10 am to 1 pm – 4 pm to 7:30 pm