VISIT DERUTA
-Ancient Grazia Furnace
At the entrance to the historic centre, near the Sant'Angelo gate, you can admire a beautiful Renaissance structure, the ancient Grazia kiln.
The structure, dating from the 16th century, was used by the Grazia company (the oldest in Deruta) for the production of its artistic ceramic products.
The Grazia di Deruta company donated the building to the Deruta municipality.
Today this building is a tourist reception where you can find all the information you need to visit our beloved town.
Not only that, inside the building there are also exhibitions and cultural and musical events.
-Via Biordo Michelotti, Deruta (google maps)
- Municipal Art Gallery
A 14th-century palace (Palazzo dei Consoli) houses Deruta's municipal art gallery.
A vast and diverse collection includes important works such as: "L'Affresco" by Pietro Vannucci also called the Perugino,
"La Madonna Dei Consoli" (1457) and the "Gonfalone di Sant'Antonio Abate" (1465-1470) by Niccolò di Liberatore also called "l'alunno".
On the upper floor, there is the Leone Pascoli collection with about forty paintings.
This collection was acquired by the municipality of Deruta in 1931 by deed of gift.
Among the works are canvases by Giovanni Battista Gaulli known as Baciccio, Antonio Amorosi, Francesco Trevisani, Sebastiano Conca, Marco Benefial, Placido Costanzi, Francesco Graziani, Giovanni Paolo Panini and Pieter Van Bloemen known as Stendardo.
-Piazza dei Consoli 12 (google maps)
- Church of San Francesco
Starting the visit from the left wall, we find a fresco from around 1520 divided into a lower and an upper part.
In the upper part we find the Virgin with two saints Francis and Bernardino, a work attributed to Domenico Alfani.
The lower part is attributed to Giovan Battista Caporali and depicts St Jerome and St Anthony.
The large painting of St Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint of ceramists, is a spectacular and impressive work by the artist-painter Lorenzo Fonda.
A curiosity about St Catherine: The town of Deruta celebrates her on 25 November, when companies and craftsmen do not work and business lunches or dinners are organised.
Continuing on, you can see the chapel of the "Madonna del Rosario" in which there is a beautiful majolica altar made by Angelo Micheletti in 1899.
Further on, we find a large fresco dating from 1390 that immortalises St Catherine on the left, presenting the commissioner of the fresco, while the Martyrdom of the Saint is depicted on the right.
In the apse, a fragmentary fresco depicting the Resurrection of Christ, of the 14th-century Umbrian school, is visible at the top left.
In the centre of the sails is the Franciscan coat of arms and in the others the symbols of the four evangelists.
On the right-hand side is the fresco of the Madonna and Child between St Peter the Apostle, St Paul of Tarsus, St Ludwig of Toulouse, St Catherine of Alexandria and St Francis of Assisi attributed to the Master of St Juliana, the fresco of Christ in the House of Martha and Mary and a niche with a fresco of St Anthony of Padua and scenes from his life.
Inside the church is a bell cast in 1228 to celebrate the canonisation of St Francis of Assisi.
-Piazza dei Consoli 21 (google maps)
-Regional Museum of Ceramics
The Regional Museum of Ceramics of Deruta,
is the oldest Italian museum specialized in this kind of artifacts.
Established in 1898, the museum is housed in a 14th century convent of San Francesco.
In addition to being a place of preservation and culture, today the museum is still a source of inspiration for Deruta's craftsmen.
Inside the museum, there are 4 exhibition levels for a total of six thousand five hundred artifacts organized in a tour by Giancarlo Bojani and Giulio Busti that allows you to explore the entire history of ceramic tradition Deruta.
Inside the museum of ceramics of Deruta, there is an underground tunnel that connects it to the ancient furnaces of San Salvatore found in 2008 during the work for the construction of a public parking lot in the historic center.
The archaeological investigation, concluded in 2010, has brought to light a sequence of structures datable between the end of 1200 and the beginning of 1700 and has allowed the recovery of a large number of ceramic artifacts, preserved in the museum's deposits.
-Largo San Francesco (google maps)
-Church of Sant'Antonio Abate
Inside, this church has important frescoes by Bartolomeo Caporali and Giovanni Battista Caporali.
In the chapel that opens on the left wall, the Perugino artist Bartolomeo Caporali, from the second half of the 15th century, in time of sickness and plague, frescoed a Madonna of Mercy between Saints Francis and Bernardino.
At the bottom of the fresco is represented the Deruta of the Middle Ages.
The vault with the Eternal Father and the evangelists is instead very damaged and repainted.
Remaining in the left wall we see a seventeenth-century painting that comes from the church of San Francesco. This canvas depicts Christ the King between the Madonna, Saint Francis, four Franciscan Saints and the souls in purgatory.
On the back wall there is a space where Giovanni Battista Caporali, Bartolomeo's son, painted the scenes from the life of Saint Anthony Abbot and the figures of Saint Roch and Saint Sebastian.
The glazed terracotta statue you see in the center is from 1553 and depicts St. Anthony the Abbot.
-Piazza Benincasa 10 (google maps)
-Panoramic Gardens
In the historic center of Deruta, in front of the house of culture, there is a garden with a beautiful view of the landscape furnished with tables and benches of Deruta ceramics.
The monument you see in the center was made by the sculptor Torquato Tamagnini in memory of the victims of the First World War.
-Piazza G.Marconi (google maps)