Ravello Coral Museum

The Coral Museum was founded in 1986 by an intuition of Giorgio Filocamo and his innate generosity: happy intuition to want to preserve the precious wealth of antiques handed down from his family, which was the root of his great vocation of Corallaro. A family with Sicilian-Neapolitan origins: there is perhaps a best mix for the blood of a "Corallaro"?

Generosity because the Coral Museum is open to all: curious and not, skeptics and unbelievers, believers or not. And the treatment is the same: so much experience, beauty, and, if you are lucky, and almost always it is, you can get away with a sprig of coral in your hands, as Giorgio Filocamo repeats always, it should necessarily be broken, Red, and Gifted.

... My grandfather had a relationship that I would say almost carnal with coral, not only of work and devotion. I owe him the irresistible charm for this precious gift of nature. Among the things that my grandfather had, there was a horn wrapped religiously. A kind of relic. The sacredness with which he touched it, and kept, and looked, aroused in me two considerations: the object had a great symbolic value, and a large apotropaic value. So it was that I approached the artisan world of coral.

It was 1955, I started at Herculaneum ... with my first models ... So, thirtytwo years ago, I arrived in Ravello with the "relics" of my grandfather, and all I had: a huge luggage of experience. I started a workshop under the cathedral "Camo". In an area behind the shop, separated by a grate, as a former prison, I put freedom in my fantasy of craftsman and my desire to see the world's coral represented in what is later to become, over the years, a real museum. Editor's note: He would never have said, but from here have passed many beautiful names of culture and entertainment, national and international.

Adapted from "Memorie di corallari", Giorgio Filocamo: La mia vita per il corallo by Marcello Napoli, Largo Campo, Centro storico Salerno July / August 1998