Rosso Marano

Rosso Marano

Ugo Marano in his Living Museum
curated by Gabriella Taddeo

Series of Plates and Tiles
WABI Collection – Emotional Gardens
Opening: Wednesday, May 20, 2026, at 6:00 p.m.
Cristina Tafuri
For Ugo Marano. Of Earth and Fire
Throughout his life, Ugo Marano was always in touch with the four elements. He sought to be in harmony with nature, to blend in like a tree or become the rustling of the wind. For Ugo Marano, the sea represented amniotic fluid; it was birth and rebirth, always, each time different like the waves of the sea that are never the same.
The sea, the boundless sea as Walt Whitman wrote, is the siren’s song that envelops our senses in the desire to belong to it completely. Marano often loved to walk barefoot to feel the earth’s energy, to be part of it—root, trunk, leaves—and this was his relationship with ceramics, to which he gave artistic value, and with his totemic vases that seemed to defy the law of gravity due to their extreme height.
In this symbiotic relationship with nature, eros becomes the natural element, a primal, cosmic force; according to philosophical doctrine, a principle that tends toward beauty, an ancient principle concerning drive and sensuality.
Clay is soft, warm; the vase becomes a womb, a vagina, a deep cavity that holds man, his sex. In ancient times, farmers scattered their seed upon the earth to ensure a bountiful harvest; the phallus was a totem, it was magic, it was life within the earth that warmly embraced it. Imagine the long, large phalluses of Roman eros as apotropaic symbols, particularly visible in the Pompeian Domus. In these works by Ugo Marano on display at the Museo Città Creativa in Ogliara, the exuberance of these figures with their disproportionate phalluses emerges from the vivid red color covering the tiles and plates, as if to reveal a desire that reigns supreme with its scepter of fiery iron. And as Picasso reminds us, there is no difference between art and eroticism.

Filomena Direttore
Museo Città Creativa
The Museo Città Creativa, now fully accessible thanks to the recent completion of the “Removal of Physical and Cognitive Barriers” project funded under the PNRR, reopens its doors to exhibition activities that will complement the workshops already underway.
And this new beginning is marked by a small retrospective on the founder and first artistic director of this museum, which is rooted in the clay-rich land that has always been characterized by the production and working of terracotta. A ceramic identity that the Museum has always sought to preserve and promote.
Ugo Marano was an outstanding master of this ancestral art, which he defined not as a minor art but as the queen of arts, the mother of all arts that emerges from every archaeological site and allows us to reconstruct the lives of people from the past and their ways of living.
This artist also succeeded in synthesizing in his works multiple creative expressions ranging from drawing to ceramics and sculpture.
I take this opportunity to reiterate the objectives of Città Creativa, aimed first and foremost at preserving and enhancing theidentity of the place but also to give visibility and strength to all significant artistic and artisanal movements, since the level of civilization of a territory is measured also and above all by the cultural richness it manages to cultivate and by the artistic quality that enhances it.
I thank those who made this exhibition possible by providing the exhibition materials that will allow visitors to discover a significant fragment of Marano’s vast body of work, which continues to speak to us of him and his great creative and imaginative spirit.

Gabriella Taddeo
Exhibition Curator
The potter of Cetara returns to speak to us in the halls of the Museo Città Creativa in Ogliara, which was one of his creations. The sequence of works on display pursues Eros as a sacred transgression and pure energy seeking ecstasy. It is the mind speaking to the body and drawing near to it in its psychological and seductive play to awaken it beyond the limits of the superego and to experience the fullness of existence. This is conveyed by these stylized beings with elongated, imaginary bodies devoid of identity, which come to life on his plates and across the surface of his tiles. The same erotic allusiveness is also present in the depiction of the bird that once towered over his Fontana Felice.
Red arrives as an echo from the House of the Vettii and other Pompeian houses, reaching him, who reinterprets it as selenium red and renders it utterly contemporary, pushing toward the boundaries of language and inner experience. The hue of red has always been, since the archaic times of the Greeks first and the Romans later, the archetype of fire as creativity, as art—particularly ceramics—but also as the flame of passion, the ardent heat that belongs to eros.
In his work, one seems to hear the fragrant echo of the Song of Songs, which extols the two lovers on a bed strewn with flowers and celebrates sexuality as a divine gift in the union of two beings who merge.
Ugo Marano had many facets; he was a pure artist in his entirety: designer, potter, sculptor, performer. He was called a “visionary talent.”
In the 1970s, he was invited to exhibit at the Rome Quadriennale, the Venice Biennale, and the Milan Triennale; in 1982, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 1991, he led the “Vasai di Cetara” group in his native region. In Salerno in 1996, he designed and created the Fontana Felice.
Ugo Marano passed away in 2011, and his body of work is currently preserved not only at “Casa Marano” in Capriglia but also in numerous museums and private collections of those who have passionately believed in him over the years. His artistic vision emerges as an innovative perspective that blends art, nature, and civilization.
His approach is not merely aesthetic but ethical, focused on environmental conservation and the celebration of craftsmanship. The artist often spoke out against a lack of civic responsibility, and for him, elegance lies not in fashion but in respect for nature, the landscape, and the community. During his time with the “Vasai di Cetara” (a group founded in 1991), Marano promoted creative work free from dogmatic and academic constraints, granting ceramics the status of contemporary art. He defined his designs as “environmental thoughts” or messages linked to the landscape and the material. His poetics have also been called the “room of utopia,” where it is a mental dwelling and a space for free creation.
“The frogs will return to croak,” the artist hoped in the manifesto regarding the economic utopia he developed together with economist Pasquale Persico, which was intended to revitalize the entire hilly area of Rufoli. And it was precisely there that the Museo Città Creativa was born in 1997—a workshop-space dedicated to ceramics, which he considered the mother of all arts, the unrecognized queen of the arts. Marano believed in a living museum, necessary in a land that has always been characterized by clay working, dotted with kilns and artisans, as he himself reminds us in the text of his Manifesto: “In Rufoli, near Salerno, there is a village where there is plenty of good clay that, when transformed into terracotta, takes on two highly enviable characteristics: the rosy hue of a little girl and the sweet, resonant sound of a bell. In this village there are many kilns that in the past provided work for the local people and supplied tiles to the potters of Vietri Sul Mare, who decorated them with grace to adorn churches and homes.”