Association "Arte in Bottega Volterra"

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To the visitor who draws near to Volterra through the austere and suggestive landscape of its soft hills, the city still appears as the poet Fazio degli Uberti described it in 1200 : "above a great mountain, strong and ancient, like no other land in Tuscany".
Strong, for the solidity transmitted by its severe profile, by its boundaries and its towers; and ancient, because every stone of the historical center brings the signs of a millennial history and the civilizations who made great the city of alabaster stone.
It is really the alabaster, a stone that is the inseparable part of the character of Volterra since the times of the Etruscans, who has given life to a history of art and craftsmanship which still endures today in the shops candid of dust, where traditional artisan wisdom renews itself and is perpetuated in time.
Volterra practically has the exclusive of alabaster workmanship, but it is also a extraordinary container of other small artistic activities, that embrace the most traditional sectors of the Italian craftsmanship.
In this sense, the city is perfectly inserted in an only apparently "minor" Tuscany, characterized by the inestimable cultural and socio-economic treasure, to a large extent unexplored and unknown, of the innumerable artisan realities, heirs of the arts and the works that have been the protagonists of the development of the region.
Different artisan realities find today a meeting point in the association "Arte in Bottega" of Volterra, been born to safeguard, revalue and promote all those forms of art, artistic craftsmanship and manual job that constitute one of the main resource of the city.
The association aims to explore and to spread the traditional workmanship techniques as well as the possibilities offered by the new technologies through participation to meetings, conferences, shows or specific projects of didactic activity, devoted to the young artisans.
But also to pick up and to publish all kinds of material on the working methods and raw materials, to create solid base competences in those who choose to be artisans.
All of this with a particular attention toward every profitable form of promotion and exploitation of the artistic and cultural patrimony, through the collaboration with all the institutions that share this scope and the search of sponsoring partners.
Arte in bottega, we can say, looks back at the pre-Renaissance model of shop, where true wealth was that to "know how" and to communicate it to others, and where between Art and Man didn't exist any border.