“It’s just a feast,” says Adele Spalluto Hubbard as she reflects on her family’s personally vetted retail collection of handmade, hand-painted Italian ceramics. “They are exactly like a painting, hand done with a brush, painstakingly made with love, and that’s the charm.”
Thirty-five years ago, her father, Ben Spalluto, an Italian immigrant, started the Italian Pottery Outlet as a wholesale business that operated out of a warehouse in what’s now called the Funk Zone. That grew out of a family trip to Italy, when Spalluto approached Nino Parrucca, the famed ceramicist who presented works to everyone from Pope John Paul II to Bill Clinton. He suggested becoming the American distributor for Parrucca, who’s famous for his fish and octopus patterns. Parrucca agreed, and the business relationship still holds today.
As he expanded his product lines, Spalluto quickly needed a retail outlet. “People would knock on the door because they could see that we had nice things in there,” said Spalluto Hubbard of how demand fueled the storefront’s gradual takeover of the warehouse and then a move to State Street. Today, the store carries more than 30 lines of Italian ceramics with some original patterns dating back to the 1500s and others that were originally designed for the Medicis. “A lot of our patterns are older,” she said. “There’s quite a history.”