A foundry, a family, and a life spent elsewhere.

Atelier Fogaccia

The name comes from a place that no longer exists under it. Borgata Fogaccia was the original name of what is today Montespaccato, a residential district on the western edge of Rome — renamed in 1945, though the streets, the people and the parish never moved. A place that changed identity while staying exactly where it was.

It is in this same district that Fonderia Boccea, the family foundry, has cast bronze for nearly a century. Every piece made under the name Atelier Fogaccia is cast there, from an original model, under direct supervision — no two pieces alike, and none reproduced. Each work is accompanied by a signed certificate of authenticity.

The atelier's current work is Organica — an investigation into erosion, conducted through void and texture. It is organized as a family of models, each explored through several individual, unique castings rather than a single fixed form. Earlier pieces, made before this study, are kept as Past Works.

Roberto Marchetti

Founder, Atelier Fogaccia

Franco Marchetti, Roberto's father, was born in Rome in 1945 and, still very young, began working at the foundry founded by his family, developing from then on a deep passion for bronze and its working.

The foundry has spanned three generations of the family and remains active today, run by the cousins of Roberto.

It's in this environment that Roberto grew up and developed his own relationship with bronze. The foundry, the material, the gestures of the work and a culture of making passed down through time have belonged to his world since childhood.

He didn't so much choose bronze as find himself already inside it — or perhaps, in some way, it was bronze that chose him.

Over the course of his life Roberto has travelled widely, coming into contact with profoundly different cultures, places and sensibilities. His roots, however, remain where he was born and raised: the outskirts of Rome.

His work emerges from the meeting of these two dimensions: a familiarity with bronze that comes from far back, and a contemporary outlook shaped by different experiences and cultures.

From this double inheritance — the material and the culture of making received from the family foundry, and an outlook shaped by his own experience — comes Atelier Fogaccia: the project through which Roberto gives contemporary form to a family relationship with bronze that precedes him, reinterpreting it through material, place and gesture.