PAPER-MACHE'

  The irresistible fascination of this material derives from its fundamental characteristics: the ease which it can be prepared and worked, its enormous versatility, and the universality of its humble components. The oldest traces of paper-machè can be found in the six-hundreds, while the nineteenth century was the height of its glory. The production techniques have been passed down, unaltered, through the centuries to the present. This craft is practiced with the poorest of raw materials: strips of paper and starch paste and, for the internal structure, straw and wire. The last components are plaster and paint. The artist, once established the size of the statue to be realized, models the faces, hands and feet in clay, and then sets them in plaster for the mold. The phases are: the forming of a straw mannequin around a wooden pole, then the modelling of it with oakum and more straw. The mannequin is then covered with strips of paper soaked in paste. The statue is left to dry for several days, then it is touched up by scorching, and only then can the artist start on the clothing and painting. Today products are those of old; variously sized sacred statuary, where the figures and subjects have basically never changed.

LECCESE STONE

  This extraordinary material can be carved as easily as wood, and can even be shaped by hand, almost as of it were clay; it can also be ground up to make a sort of foam, with which designes as intricate as lace can be realized. The hardness and strength increase with exposure; when extracted it can be cut with a knife, after only a few days it is already solid. Leccese stone is a calcareous rock that has been selected throughout the centuries for its architectural adaptability. Due to its malleable nature, It has always been used for decorations, especially in the baroque period in Lecce. The artists of that epoch were able to express all their fantasies, modellingit into friezes, scrolls, capitals, fringes, cornices, and working it easily with the lathe. This light yellow, porous, finely textured rock has collected and conserved a variegated and vast array of fossils, mostly of marine animals.