Corfu
— — a Venetian town the cypresses outlived.
Not only on a wall.
“A green island that reads more Italian than Greek when you walk it. Corfu sits in the Ionian, the second-largest of the chain, close enough to the Albanian coast that you can see the mountains across the strait. Four centuries of Venetian rule left the Old Town its arcades, its tall stuccoed houses, and the cricket pitch on the Spianada that nobody has the heart to move. Olive groves cover most of the interior, planted under Venetian bounty and still working. The studio reaches for that lived-in honey colour of the stone at the end of the day.
Corfu, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Corfu, known in Greek as Kerkyra, is the second-largest of the Ionian Islands and the northernmost, lying off the northwest coast of mainland Greece directly opposite the Albanian shoreline. The island covers about 610 square kilometres and rises to Mount Pantokrator at 906 metres in the north. Around 100,000 people live on the island, roughly a third of them in Corfu Town on the east coast. Unlike most of Greece, Corfu was never under Ottoman rule; Venice held it from 1386 to 1797, and the result is a built landscape and civic culture closer in feel to the Adriatic than to the Aegean.
The Old Town of Corfu was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007 for the integrity of its fortified urban ensemble. Two Venetian fortresses bracket the town: the Old Fortress on a rocky promontory east of the centre, begun by the Byzantines and rebuilt by Venice from the 15th century, and the New Fortress to the northwest, built between 1572 and 1645. Between them runs the Liston, a French-built arcade of cafés modelled on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, raised during the brief Napoleonic occupation. Across the Spianada, the green where the British later played cricket, the town opens toward the sea.
The Ionian climate is gentler and wetter than the Aegean. Winters are mild and rainy; summers are hot and dry, with July and August averaging around 32°C in the afternoon and the sea warm enough for swimming from late May through October. Olive trees cover roughly half the island, the descendants of a Venetian decree that paid bounties for every tree planted; the harvest runs October into January, and the older mills still take some of it. Spring is when the island shows what its name means: the hillsides go through wild iris, broom, and oleander before the heat dries them down.