Kadapa
— — the threshold to the southern hills.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of the Rayalaseema plateau, ringed by the low ridges of the Nallamala and Palkonda hills. The Telugu name Gadapa means threshold, marking the old gateway to the pilgrim road south to Tirupati. The stone the quarries pull from the surrounding hills is a slate so flat it leaves the saw clean, and floors half of southern India.
Kadapa, 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.
Kadapa, written Cuddapah under the British, is the headquarters of Kadapa district in the Rayalaseema region of Andhra Pradesh, about 260 kilometres south of Hyderabad. The city sits at roughly 138 metres above sea level on the eastern edge of the Deccan plateau, ringed by the Nallamala range to the west and the Palkonda hills to the south. The Penna River runs east of the city. The 2011 census recorded a population of about 344,000.
Kadapa stone is a fine-grained, dark-grey to black limestone slate quarried from the Cuddapah Supergroup of Proterozoic sedimentary rock that gives the district its name. The beds are over a billion years old. The slate cleaves so flat under the saw that it is shipped across India as flooring, paving, and kitchen-counter cladding. The same geological formation also holds the country's only major barite deposits at Mangampeta, about sixty kilometres northeast of the city.
The Ameen Peer Dargah in the old city is the shrine of the eighteenth-century Sufi saint Peerullah Hussaini and draws pilgrims of every faith throughout the year; the annual Urs festival in the Islamic month of Rajab is the largest gathering. Gandikota, sometimes called the Grand Canyon of India, lies about ninety kilometres north on the Penna River. The city is reached by overnight train from Hyderabad and Chennai, both about six hours away.