Essevi Torino Biography
The "Essevi" factory for the production of artistic ceramics was founded in 1934 by the painter, ceramist and designer Sandro Vacchetti in partnership with the Turin ceramist Nello Franchini, both former employees of the Turin ceramic factory "Lenci". The production of the company, which avails itself, among others, of the collaboration of the sculptor Otto Maraini and of Giovanni Grande and his wife Ines Panchieri Grande, often follows the works of the "Lenci" company, of which Vacchetti had been artistic director since its foundation until 1933, and is made up of figures of little women often in fashionable or skimpy clothes. From the end of the 1930s, "Essevi" also availed itself of the collaboration of the Cagliari sculptor Alessandro Mola di R. Alemanno and Camillo Ghigo and also of the decorators Margherita Costantino and Renata Ponti and of Giovanni Taverna to whom Vacchetti entrusted the role of artistic director - designer. In the years of the Second World War the manufacturing moved to Carrù, in the province of Cuneo, where it achieved reduced production. Having returned to Turin in 1945, "Essevi" closed its doors in 1952, the year in which, having left his activity as a ceramist, Sandro Vacchetti returned to dedicate himself, for a few years, exclusively to painting. In the early sixties Sandro Vacchetti moved to Rome where, together with Romagnolo and Assandro, he founded the "Crea" ceramic factory where, among others, Bruno Bagnoli worked. The manufacturing company continues production on some of the "Essevi" molds without however achieving the same qualitative results.
