Cooperativa Artieri Alabastro

Cooperativa Artieri Alabastro
Volterra, Tuscany, Italy

Alabaster has been worked in Volterra — a medieval hill town in Tuscany — for centuries, quarried from the chalky hills around the town and turned, carved and polished entirely by hand. In 1895 the craftspeople who worked it formed a cooperative: a shared warehouse and marketplace where every maker could sell, and where each piece was checked before it left. Four hundred and seventy-two of them signed up in the first year, alongside thirty-five apprentices.

The name came later. When Gabriele D'Annunzio visited Volterra in 1908, it was he who gave the cooperative the word "Artieri" — an old Tuscan term for those who work with their hands. It has carried the name ever since, through two world wars, the crash of 1929 and the years of Fascism, and out the other side: by the 1950s the co-op's alabaster was shipping to Mexico, Greece, Portugal and the United States, and the great names of Italian design were coming to Volterra to work with it.

More than a century on, the cooperative still operates from the town's medieval heart, with five windows on Piazza dei Priori, and has been recognised as a Historic Enterprise of Italy. The pieces we carry are made from alabaster quarried in the hills around Volterra and worked entirely by hand — no two the same.

We carry Cooperativa Artieri because alabaster worked by hand has a weight and softness no machine reproduces — and because a piece like this only exists while the tradition behind it does.

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