From Vietri sul Mare to Milan, New York, London and the Netherlands, Gianluca spent years exploring different places and creative worlds, gradually developing his own language through design, photography and a deep curiosity about the relationship between people, places and identity.

Then came the pull back home. "The hardest thing isn't leaving. It's returning." Gianluca came back and settled in Erchie, a village of a hundred souls on the Amalfi Coast, and tried to build something in a place he loved, even when that place didn't make things easy.
In 2016, together with architect Pamela La Rocca, he created Ciucci&Pesci: a line of ceramic tiles that takes two symbols of the territory — the donkey and the fish, the land and the sea — and turns them into a visual system. Black and white only, positive and negative. Each piece exists in relation to its counterpart: a donkey without its fish makes no sense, and neither does the reverse.

It all took shape at Ceramica Pinto, a historic manufactory in Vietri, where Gianluca shares the space with Salvatore Autori — screen printer turned ceramicist, and the mentor behind his visual language — and with Virginio Quarta, a painter of 88 who still works there every day. Three generations, three paths, one table. Manganese, with its range from black to dusty pink, became the visual and chromatic signature of Ciucci&Pesci. A quiet nod to the façade of Palazzo Pinto, designed by Giovannino Carrano in the 1970s.

Ten years of experimentation, of testing, of learning. Today, Gianluca knows where he's going.