Hotel Arte (Castelli, Italy)

About Hotel Arte

Located at the foot of Monte Camicia, in the middle of National Park of Gran Sasso, the country of Castelli where Arte is situated is a village surrounded by farming and clay gullies. The birth of Castelli ceramics is mainly due to these natural features, the presence of clay quarries, forests for wood streams and the deposits of silica, already in Etruscan times. But it was above all the presence of Benedictine monks took office in the territory since the fifteenth century which developed the tradition of pottery. These monks then taught the villagers to use clay to make pottery. Since then the country has lived ceramics, up to the 17th and18th centuries, when great master potters made this product really refined art, appreciated in the courts of kings. At the school of the families of Grue, of Gentile and Cappelletti should be objects of beauty. In the village you can visit the church of St. John the Baptist, who keeps an altarpiece ceramic made in 1647 by Frederick Grue. Along the village there are many shops where you can still produce and sell many items of this valuable material.