San Giovanni Rotondo
— a still hill town the world keeps coming to.
Not only on a wall.
“A small town on the Gargano spur, four hours east of Rome and a long way from anywhere coastal Italians think of when they think of Puglia. People come for Padre Pio, the Capuchin friar who lived in the convent here from 1916 until his death in 1968. They come for the church Renzo Piano built around his tomb, a long stone arc that opens onto a piazza for thirty thousand. Most days a line forms before dawn and stays until the doors close. The hill above the town is olive and limestone, the southern slope of the Gargano massif. Few places hold a crowd this quietly.
San Giovanni Rotondo, 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.
San Giovanni Rotondo is a town of about 26,000 in the Province of Foggia, on the southern slope of the Gargano massif in Puglia (Apulia), the spur of the Italian peninsula. It sits at around 557 metres on a limestone plateau above the coastal plain that runs down to Manfredonia and the Adriatic. The Gargano National Park surrounds it on three sides. The town's modern identity is shaped by the Capuchin friar Padre Pio (Francesco Forgione, 1887-1968), who lived at the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie from 1916 until his death and was canonised by John Paul II in 2002. Today the Sanctuary of Saint Pio is among the most-visited Catholic pilgrimage sites in the world.
The Gargano massif is limestone, a hard pale stone that the town has used for centuries and that Renzo Piano chose for the new pilgrimage church beside the old convent. Completed in 2004, the church of San Pio da Pietrelcina is built around twenty-two radial arches of Apricena stone quarried thirty kilometres west of the town. The largest spans fifty metres without a column. The interior holds around 6,500 seated; the sloping piazza outside holds tens of thousands more for the major feast days. Below the main church, in a lower church opened in 2010 to receive Padre Pio's body from the old sanctuary, lies his tomb. The old convent church of Santa Maria delle Grazie still stands beside it, smaller, sixteenth-century, and largely unchanged.
The sanctuary complex sits at the western edge of town. The old convent church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the Capuchin friary, and the Renzo Piano pilgrimage church share one piazza; admission to all three is free. The pilgrimage church holds Mass in Italian several times a day; the lower church, where Padre Pio's tomb lies, is open from early morning to evening with a midday closure. Most pilgrims also visit the preserved cell where Padre Pio lived and prayed, inside the friary. The largest crowds gather on his feast day, 23 September, and on weekends in summer. The town has a regional bus link from Foggia, the provincial capital about 40 kilometres south-west, and from San Severo on the Bologna-Lecce rail line.