The signature of the fire
In Faenza, one of the last wood-fired kilns turns its flaws into the only mark that cannot be faked.
By Lu · 9 April 2026
Faenza gave the world the word faience, and then, mostly, gave up the fire that made it. Gas kilns are predictable, clean, kind to a schedule. Bottega Terracqua still burns wood for three days and nights, the potters sleeping in shifts, because predictability is exactly what they are trying to avoid.
The flame leaves marks — a blush of ash on a rim, a run of glaze where the heat surged. A factory would call these defects and grind them out. Here they are the point. "The signature of the fire," one of the potters calls them, and once you have held a piece, the flawless ones look a little dead by comparison.
It is the same lesson the moodboard for this project kept insisting on: the points of colour, the accident, the human hand. Take them out and the thing goes quiet in the wrong way.