Deruta

Deruta sits on a hill above the Tiber, fifteen kilometers south of Perugia. The town has been making maiolica continuously since the late thirteenth century, when the first documented kilns appear in the archaeological record. By the early sixteenth century its workshops were producing the lustro that gave Deruta wares their metallic shine and the Bella Donna plates with named portraits of beauties on flattering banderoles.

The Museo Regionale della Ceramica, founded in 1898 inside the fourteenth-century convent of San Francesco, is the oldest ceramics museum in Italy and holds over six thousand pieces. The Pinacoteca Comunale next door keeps an Eterno and Saints Romano e Rocco by Perugino and two works by Niccolò Alunno from the same complex. The road from Perugia to Rome runs through the lower town, lined with workshops still firing pieces by hand, most of them family-run for three or four generations.