Gargano Coast
— white stone, and the blue it falls into.
Not only on a wall.
“The spur of Italy, where white limestone cliffs drop into the Adriatic and the sea works its way into caves you reach only by boat. Vieste sits on the chalk above, the Pizzomunno standing offshore, a single white stack the fishermen have a story about. Behind the coast the land climbs into the Foresta Umbra, beech trees three centuries old, cool and dark after the glare off the water. Two kinds of light here: the white of the rock, and the blue underneath. The boats go quiet when they slide into the grottoes.
Gargano Coast, 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.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Gargano is the mountainous promontory that forms the spur of the Italian boot, in the province of Foggia in Apulia, jutting into the Adriatic on three sides. It runs about 65 kilometres long and rises inland to Monte Calvo at 1,065 metres. Most of the upland, roughly 1,200 square kilometres across 18 municipalities, falls inside Gargano National Park, founded in 1991. The coast is the part most people come for: white limestone cliffs, sea caves, and beach towns such as Vieste, Peschici, and Mattinata strung along the water. Inland the land climbs quickly into the Foresta Umbra, an old beech and oak woodland, so a single morning can move from open sea to deep forest in half an hour's drive.
The whole promontory is a single block of Mesozoic limestone, laid down as seabed in the Jurassic and Cretaceous and lifted into a karst massif geologically twinned with the Dalmatian coast across the Adriatic. That white rock is what gives the coast its look: pale cliffs that hold the light, riddled with caves and grottoes the sea has hollowed out over thousands of years. At Vieste the most famous piece of it stands just offshore, the Pizzomunno, a limestone sea stack about 25 metres high that has become the town's emblem, carried in a local legend of a young fisherman turned to stone. Up close the rock is full of fossils, the old seabed still legible in the cliff face.
The water along the Gargano runs clear and pale over white sand and limestone, which is why much of this coast carries Blue Flag status for bathing quality, with Vieste among the towns awarded it more than once. The most striking stretches cannot be reached on foot: a line of sea caves and grottoes between Vieste and Mattinata that boats slip into, where light comes up through the water and turns the cave walls green and blue. Offshore, about 20 kilometres to the north, the Tremiti Islands sit in their own marine reserve. The Adriatic here is shallow and warm by late summer, and calm enough most mornings that the small tour boats run on time.