Story

My playroom was the factory. As a child, I didn’t like to go to kindergarten, so my father Giovanni De Simone used to take me with him and while he was carving beautiful bas-relief panels, I played with those clay curls that came out of his stick.
I could smell the baking of the biscuit, I looked at the raw colors changing magically after being cooked.

Over time I became his pupil by painting the stories he told me while he designed vases, plates, and plates.

We waited for the firing of our work and impatiently opened the still-hot oven hearing the song that the ceramic produces due to the thermal shock.

Dad had studied as a young man at the Faenza school of ceramics, he had found the chemical combination to cook the red color at the same temperature as the other glazes, for this reason, red would have been eventually his primary color, the one that will characterize the new Sicilian ceramics.

He was very young when he moved to Palermo where he opened his first workshop and with my mother: Eliana, he brought the prestige of his ceramics around the world.

After attending the art high school, with masters such as Giambecchina, Perrè, Tumminello, I entered the factory no longer to play, as a child, but for work.

I began my artistic career in the creative sector where I was able to best express those skills as a designer that my father saw in me, necessary for the creation of new products. In my life, places and encounters have marked my artistic growth. Pantelleria had a great influence, where we had a shop, which I followed since I was a young girl, and where I lived and my son Vito was born. Rome, the city where, in the 1980s, I lived managing a shop in Via Margutta with a laboratory. Dad always followed me and often came to Rome to experience with me that particular atmosphere of art and culture that the many local painters created. When he died, I returned to Palermo to stay close to my family and since 2007 I have been managing “The ceramic factory”.