An ante litteram company profile for the land of owls

Among the many well-known figures whose stories intertwine with those of the Manifattura di Doccia, Carlo Lorenzini (1826-1890), better known by his pen name Collodi, deserves a special mention.

Carlo was born at Palazzo Ginori on via Taddea: his father Domenico was a cook in the service of the marquises, for whom the future writer’s mother, Angelina Orzani, worked as a maid and seamstress. The Ginori family paid for his and his brother Paolo’s education.

The bond between Collodi and the Ginori family was further strengthened starting in 1847, when Paolo Lorenzini began working in the “scrittojo” of Marquis Lorenzo (the Florentine office managing the family’s considerable real estate and land holdings) and traveled to France and England to discover, in other manufactories, secrets and talents to bring back to the Doccia factory, which he would soon direct.

With remarkable entrepreneurial boldness, Paolo Lorenzini transformed the Manifattura Ginori. In his hands, the factory became a permanent site of technological and commercial innovation, and in just a few years it grew from 300 to 1,200 employees. Under his leadership, Ginori produced everything from large hand-crafted artistic ceramics to porcelain, earthenware, and terracotta tableware, as well as a wide variety of everyday objects, including stoves.

In those years, Carlo worked at the prefecture of Florence and was involved in journalism and literary criticism. In 1861, on the occasion of the first National Exhibition in Florence, the Ginori family asked him to write a booklet about the Manifattura directed by his brother.

Published under the title La Manifattura delle porcellane di Doccia. Cenni illustrativi raccolti da C.L., the booklet is a true “company profile” ante litteram, which still impresses today for its clear writing, the precision with which the factory’s heritage is reconstructed, its capacity for innovation described, and the social responsibility of its enlightened owners celebrated.

The year following their publication, the Cenni illustrativi written by Carlo were distributed by Paolo to all the editors and journalists of the main English newspapers present at the 1862 London Exhibition. This pioneering institutional communication effort would play a fundamental role in the promotional campaign of the Ginori brand, whose success in London marked a turning point for the Doccia factory.

Collodi would return to talk about porcelain many years later, describing the Manifattura di Doccia in the successful children's textbook La lanterna magica di Giannettino, first published in 1890 and reprinted for many years thereafter.

A deeply rooted local tradition holds that even in his masterpiece The Adventures of Pinocchio, there are numerous references to the Manifattura Ginori and to real places and characters from the Sesto area, from the Locanda del Gambero Rosso to the Blue Fairy. Some passionate local scholars have, for example, hypothesized that the famous “country of the barn owls” is the village of Colonnata, with its imposing porcelain factory at the center. Nicola Rilli writes on the subject: “When the Ginori workers left the factory, their clothes were dusty and dirty with kaolin, that kind of mineral, that is, with which plates, trays, etc. are made, and they were a grayish, indefinite color like the plumage of the barn owls. In fact, often their hair, face, mustache, eyelashes, and eyebrows were that color too, so they really looked like big barn owls. At least this, according to the elders, was the impression that Lorenzini had of them.”