Thanks to the great businesses with the eastern world by land and later via Marittima, Europe acquired many important products for people’s daily life. Wonderful light and elegant in silk fabrics were imported, the spices necessary for the conservation of the foods or minerals necessary in the textile manufacture, so much so that in Florence the importance of alum grew decidedly in the last years of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, when the production of increasingly luxurious wool clothes and the development of the silk industry increased the use of grain and crimsis, the dyes from which the most prestigious shades of red were obtained who found their most effective bite in alume.
But even in the world of “pharmacies” the arrival of herbs from the East were very important. But how did these herbs or spices come from the East without deteriorating for the long journey? Obviously in sacks or ceramic containers sometimes in aged inside for the conservation of these products, but to remedy all these problems, the products from China and India were shipped through an object obtained from the enormous “forests” always green that produce a light but very resistant material capable of enduring truly incredible stresses, it is bamboo. As you all know the interior of the bamboo is cable, so what is better than this plant found in abundance and has a capacity for containing materials such as spices or herbs in an almost aseptic environment (the diameter on average is 15-20 cm) It is easy to position inside the ships but also on wagons or even animals such as camels. The arrival of this natural bamboo envelope has conditioned the shape of the vases that we can still see in some old pharmacies or herbalists today.
Clearly as you also mean the eye wants its part and so this is that the great ceramist masters have created those beautiful vases sometimes very decorated sometimes simpler that we can see in ancient furniture that in some way bring us back in time. The shape of this container is called Albarello or Alberello and resumes the contours of bamboo, the cylindrical part with the characteristic chokes on the sides. Each ceramic shop in this case also tried to make this container a real work of art.
If you like this article, come with us to visit Florence, our beautiful city. We are official tour guide of Florence and we are running our Florence Free Tour. We are starting from Santa Maria Novella square, our meeting point is in front of Minerva Hotel.
