Above the door of Ficulab you can still read "Terrecotte since 1834" . A long history of clay artisans who from father to son passed on the work of the potter. Very useful in a time when so many containers of daily use were made of terracotta. The production of the Croce workshop was varied; jugs, plates, glasses and pots, but above all “olle” for the preservation of oil. Since the sixties, plastic containers and in the case of oil, steel drums have caused a crisis throughout Italy for the production of terracotta. Many shops close but Costantino's holds out for a long time. He produces crock pots that are successful and brings his merchandise to the market every week. His workshop is well visited and Costantino is a reference point for many visitors to Ficulle. With his good memory of the life of the small town he is an invaluable source of information. But time passes and the pottery closes for lack of a successor. For years the workshop of Costantino del Croce has been waiting for a new life.
To know more about Costantino's workshop and his work but also about all the work done to create Ficulab you can look on FB
The founder of Ficulab is Irene Stellingwerff. Irene is Dutch by birth, but she comes to Italy immediately after the final exams of the Academy of Fine Arts. After a year in the small artists town Anticoli Corrado and various gimmicks to make ends meet in 1986 she enters the world of editorial graphics. From 1990 Irene also works as a tourist guide in Rome. Storytelling and educating on art combined with the craft of graphic design results in the production of picture books about art for children, a whole serie of them, that are sold in the bookshops of famous museums in Italy. In 2019 she falls in love with the idea of creating in Ficulle, in the old workshop of Costantino del Croce a center to stimulate the creative process in many of its forms. Being the workshop already equipped for the work with clay, that material will be very present in the activities of the center next to other forms of artistic experimentation, both in the field of installation, drawing, interactive design and group creativity.
Here some of the work of Irene Stellingwerff