Giovanna Bianucci is the only female plaster modeller. She has worked in Pietrasanta for 30 years, although she took up modelling purely by chance.
Actually, you could say she did it for a laugh. A friend jokingly kicked a ball of plaster at Giovanna (a top class volley ball player), who kept it and went on later to acquire one of the most important and complex skills in the production of works of art, learning it from a master of the art. Producing the negative mould for a work of art by modelling in plaster the empty space around an object, is hard and difficult work, but it is the only way to make the wax models used in the casting of bronze and other metals.