Volterra

A walled hill town in western Tuscany, above the Cecina valley. The stone is the same grey-gold as Siena but cooler, harder, older. Etruscan walls underneath everything. The trade is alabaster: small lit shops down the side streets where it's still cut on lathes, where the cream and the milk and the storm-cloud veins come out of the same hill. The wind is the constant fact, the tramontana coming down off the ridge for most of the autumn. The light comes up off the alabaster from inside.

Slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, in our family studio in Knoxville, Tennessee.