One of the more interesting displays at Cersaie, the international tile show held in Bologna last September, was from the Tagina Company. I emailed the firm a few weeks ago, requesting an interview. Instead, CEO Mario Moriconi sent me a history and a bit of an Italian tutorial on his company and its newest products:
The Tagina company’s name is derived from the name the Romans gave to the small town of Gualdo Tadino, where our factory was established in 1972. It’s in the region of Umbria, the “Green Heart of Italy,” near to Assisi and Gubbio. It’s an area rich in art, and where the making of artistic pottery is a tradition that goes back many centuries.
Since 220 B.C., during the time of the Romans, ceramic tesserae from this area were used to decorate Tagina’s thermae.
The company has a stock capital of 6,170,000 euro, a net worth of nearly 26 million euro, and an average turnover in the last two years of 35 million euro, 60 percent of which was in exports.
It has an estimated production capacity of 2,300,000 square meters/year and approximately three hundred people working for it, over 230 of whom are direct employees. Its enviable sales organization is covering all the continents on the globe.
Tagina’s philosophy for both classic and contemporary lines has always been the search for a product that unites tradition with design and with the most advanced technology, which would give the heirs of a thousand-year-old ceramic school the ability to express themselves at the highest levels and the capability to create a dialogue with international design for decorating the homes of today and tomorrow.
In short, we produce ceramics with high technical performance that are extraordinarily innovative, but that also can express the individuality of craftsmanship, with the look and feel of the one-off piece, the use of the old metallic luster technique or the casting of the most precious pieces – often anticipating fashions and trends outside the traditional archetypes.
The knowledge and inspiration of Tagina’s master ceramists, their love for the millenary art tradition of Umbria, have given rise to an inexhaustible creative capacity, and a style and inimitable ceramic technique known as the “Tagina School.”
From the unforgettable, classical, soft draperies and iridescent columns of Laura Biagiotti to the flowing, effervescent textural expressions of the Wire line by Simone Micheli and the very recent Warm Stones, Woodays, Hard Rock Beton, Pietra del Mondo and Palazzo collections, or the 20 mm thick tiles for floating floors or the large 82×82 and 92×92 cm formats, Tagina draws on the most significant directions in the tile industry, offering ceramics that are aesthetically and technically innovative and exclusive, recognized as such and identified as being representative of “made in Tagina” design, which is likesaying “Supermade in Italy.”
For more information, go to http://www.tagina.it/
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