The Rubboli Collection

«Factory collections are of great importance as one of the foundations of the history of ceramics, but history has shown they are vulnerable to economic factors. Perhaps only two family workshops in Italy, that of the Cantagalli family in Florence and that of the Grazia family in Deruta, have comparably long and distinguished histories in making neo-Renaissance lustreware to Rubboli’s. The Grazia factory is, happily, still working and has retained its factory museum; but in 1971, after the closure of the Cantagalli factory, the Raccolta Storica della Manifattura Cantagalli was deplorably dispersed in a sale at Sotheby’s in Florence. In England, where no law corresponding to the Italian notifica exists, the factory collection of one of the greatest of Stoke-on Trent’s firms, Minton’s, was recently, equally scandalously, dispersed at auction. Posterity will have cause to be grateful that, thanks to Maurizio Tittarelli Rubboli and his collaborators and supporters, Gualdo Tadino has retained and even enhanced, and now put on public display in the building where it is historically most eloquent, a collection which encapsulates so important a part of the town’s cultural and historic identity» (Timothy Wilson).