Italian Patina Pot

For most of its life you would not have seen this pot at all. A 19th-century Italian confit pot, it spent its years sunk to the shoulder in the cool earth of a cellar floor, only its handle showing, keeping meat and fat and the winter’s provisions cold long before there was any other way. The ground gave it this skin, blackened and crusted and barnacled over the seasons into a surface no maker could ever fake. Now Sylvie brings it up into the light, stood on its own like a piece of sculpture or filled with bare branches, and lets the pot tell the rest.