The people of Impruneta are very proud of the local clay, which is one of the best in the world: the most compact and elastic, capable, in its unbaked states and when is baked, the most resistant to attrition, temperature swings and frost. Above everything, it is the rosiest, with a color like living flash. It is clay, with high iron content, extracted in Impruneta itself and in the surrounding hills. In Impruneta, clay is everywhere, an important feature of artistic expression and of daily life. The landscape has been shaped by the exploitation of clay, which has nailed upon the color and appearance of Impruneta and surrounding areas, to the extent that it crops up in place names, in urban fixtures, in decorative items and in the ornamentation of gardens terraces and roofs. In Impruneta, there are families that have been in the ceramics business since the 14th century; the Brandi the Casini, later joined by the Codacci, the Falciani and many others. These families have exploited a congenial local sedimentary basin, which explains the high density of kilns in the area and the quality of their products. Impruneta began to systematically exploit the local clay reserves way back in the Middle Ages, when the kilns men founded a guild in order to protect the quality and production of their products with clearly defined statutes. In the medieval period the local craftsmen made jars, basins, tableware and bricks, but they gradually modulated in the production of jars, because of agricultural world to store and sell wine and oil in increasingly larger quantities. In the 16th the first artistic variants started to be introduced. These had a coat of yellow or green lead paint often splashed with various colors. Today we can se examples of this work in ancient collection in a number of hospitals or in the palaces of the Florentine nobility. It was in Renaissance, in Medici Florence, that terracotta became a specific part of the history of art, and today is still one of the characteristic colors of the regional capital, seen in the form of roof tiles, church domes, the facades and crests of certain noble palaces. Terracotta became an applied art, visible in building features, in garden furnishings, and in unnumbered statues of a wonderfully classical beauty. Terracotta of Impruneta is very resistant to the elements and therefore well suited to outdoor environments, the kilns men responded to the needs of Florence architects and nobles, using their skills to diversify their production; alongside traditional objects of everyday use, they developed a more artistic and decorative range of work which is still executed with great technical rigorousness today.