Treasure Island

Just south of Italy, an archipelago that rose to wealth and power during the Crusades is reclaiming its throne as a luxury lover's paradise.

- Mark Ellwood

They call them Aldo’s Fish.

The brightly coloured, distinctly mid-century patterns on the plates at Villa Bologna Pottery in Malta were designed by Aldo Cremona, who worked there for more than 70 years. Born deaf to a poor family, he had limited schooling and never learnt to speak, communicating instead through his vibrant artwork. The facility’s signature scroll design was his handiwork, too, as were a series of water jugs, jauntily daubed with splotches of paint to resemble women. “They were supposed to be saluting admirals, but Aldo didn’t like painting men, so he made them ladies instead,” says the pottery’s owner, Sophie Edwards. Cremona died last year, but there’s still a shelf full of those jugs in the workshop acting as templates for the designs. A small sticker indicates each of their names: Violetta with her bedroom eyes, for instance, or Delft-blue Flora.

The workshop itself is almost a century old, founded in 1924 as a philanthropic effort to help employ local women, but it has been re-energised in the three years since Edwards and her husband, Rowley, took over. “Everyone in Malta knows the pottery—the pineapple lamps are popular wedding gifts,” she explains. Now, though, the couple hope to build a bigger audience; last year, they opened their first foreign store, in London’s stylish Holland Park, and launched e-commerce for the US this spring. Every piece will continue to be handmade.