Giovanni DeSimone

Giovanni De Simone was born in Palermo in 1930 and trained at the ceramics institute in Faenza. Back in Palermo he spent about forty years making hand-painted pottery that joined the modern painting he admired, Picasso among it, to the colours and figures of Sicilian folk art. His first factory there, called Dester, was set up for him by his father, Leopoldo, in partnership with the Terrasi brothers, according to the city of Palermo's biographical archive. He is credited with an orange-red known simply as De Simone.

From our shop

The pair of espresso cups and saucers we found in September 2026 is painted with faces in his manner, and each cup is signed DeSimone with the numbers 64/1 on the base. We have not found a reliable source that explains the numbers, so we do not read them as a date.

He died in 1991. In 2019 the University of Palermo showed his work at the city's botanical garden in L'arte oltre la materia, with a catalogue from Palermo University Press.