Italy is one of the world’s largest producers of high-quality natural pigments. Since the beginning of its history, the Italic peninsula has been the cultural center of many peoples and cultures, and this has also been possible thanks to the extraordinary variety of resources that a country like Italy offers by virtue of its favorable geographic location, which has contributed to making this peninsula a symbol of quality art and craftsmanship.Regardless of the historical era, Italy has always been a symbol of excellence in these fields.
Italy owes much of its success in the artistic field precisely to the quality of its colors and the ease with which artists of the past could source them, obtaining quality colors with minimal effort. In every area of Italy it is possible to find historic quarries and deposits from which natural earths are extracted that have made the history of color and man, some of which have documented uses dating back even to the cave paintings of cavemen. It was later the Roman Empire with writings such as those of Vitruvius and Pliny that were the first to classify and identify the deposits in the various places in Italy where the best quality colored pigments were obtained.
Piazza del Campo (Siena) – Production Site Of The Famous Yellow Earth
Over the centuries this knowledge has been passed down, and the use of coloring earths was the only way to obtain color for many centuries until the arrival of industrial dyes. So many of these deposits were of great importance for centuries, producing coloring earths that were known and exported to every corner of the world because of the quality of the colors that could be obtained from the famous Italian earths. Especially during the Kingdom of Sardinia, under the leadership of the Savoys, and in the early periods of the Kingdom of Italy, this knowledge was dusted off driven by the great building renewal that was triggered by the unification of the country, and that was probably the period of greatest production of coloring earths in Italy.
Production in Italy
In the postwar period, the use of natural earths as coloring agents for masonry paint was drastically reduced due to the arrival of artificial dyes and large-scale industrial production. As a result, today most of Italy’s coloring earth deposits were completely abandoned given a total lack of market, and it is only thanks to the rediscovery of ancient decoration and coloring techniques that some of these historic deposits now endure and carry on the production of coloring earths with a long tradition. Although they may not be so popular for many, some of these natural pigments are present of the most important works of art history that are now considered world heritage and are well known to the most experienced artists and restorers in our country. Let’s look at what were the main deposits in Italy for obtaining colored earths and what kind of pigment was produced in those areas, each with its own particular characteristics that must have been well known to artists and artisans.
Brentonico (Trento) – Green Pigments Production Site
The Sources Of Information
There are a number of modern studies that especially the Polytechnic University of Turin has conducted on the history of natural earths in Italy, grouping together valuable records that tell the story of pigments during the Kingdom of Sardinia and during the first decades of the Kingdom of Italy, which as mentioned above was the period of greatest production of coloring earths in our country. Works such as “Cenni di statistica mineralogica degli Stati di S.M il Re di Sardegna, ovvero Catalogo Regionale della raccolta formasi presso l’Azienda Generale dell’Interno” written by Vincenzo Barelli in 1835 have been a valuable source for researchers such as Paolo Scarzella to create a general picture of what was the production of natural earths in Italy.
The Main Natural Pigments Mined in Italy
By natural earths we generally mean all substances of mineral origin that can be used as coloring pigments. There are also many natural pigments that are commonly referred to as earths but actually are not, such as lapis lazuli, which have different origins and generally being very difficult pigments to obtain have not found great use in wall decoration.
We consider these pigments to be totally natural in that these are used without any mineralogical alteration but are simply washed and possibly ground to be prepared for use. Then there are what are instead called “burnt earths,” where the pigments undergo an actual “burning” that results in important mineralogical changes and alters their coloring characteristics. The main types of natural earths that have been produced in Italy are:
- Terre Ocre Gialle e Terre di Siena
- Terre Ocre Rosse
- Terre D’Ombra
- Ocre Brune
- Terre Verdi
All these natural pigments owe their coloring character to one or more iron compounds.
Pozzuoli (Napoli) – Production Site of Red Pigments
Natural Pigments Mining Zones in Italy
Here is a small list of some of the major locations that have mined and produced high quality natural pigments on Italian soil.
- LOCALITA’: La Thuile (Aosta) PRODUZIONE: Ocra Rossa
- LOCALITA’: Orta San Giulio (Novara) PRODUZIONE: Ocra Ferruginosa
- LOCALITA’: Lazzolo (Bergamo) PRODUZIONE: Ocra Gialla
- LOCALITA’: Val di Susa e Lanzo (Torino) PRODUZIONE: Terra d’Ombra
- LOCALITA’: Mondovì (Cuneo) PRODUZIONE: Ocra Gialla e Rossa, Terre d’Ombra
- LOCALITA’: Brentonico (Trento) PRODUZIONE: Terra Verde
- LOCALITA’: Prun (Verona) PRODUZIONE: Terra Verde
- LOCALITA’: Valdagno (Vicenza) PRODUZIONE: Ocra Gialla
- LOCALITA’: Monte Amiata (Siena) PRODUZIONE: Ocra Gialla e Rossa
- LOCALITA’: Monti della Tolfa (Roma) PRODUZIONE: Ocra Gialla e Rossa
- LOCALITA’: Pozzuoli (Napoli) PRODUZIONE: Terra Rossa
- LOCALITA’: Pazzano (Reggio Calabria) PRODUZIONE: Limonite
- LOCALITA’: Villamassargia (Sassari) PRODUZIONE: Ocre Gialle, Marroni, Violette
In addition to local production, Italy has often imported natural lands mainly from neighboring France but also from Germany, Austria, Britain and Turkey.
Historic Center Verona – Green Pigments Production Site
Tipologie Dei Giacimenti di Terre Naturali
Given the importance of iron in rocks for the earth to have good coloring power, the environments in which concentrations of minerals with this characteristic are formed are basically as follows:
- Surface alteration zones of iron ore deposits.
- Karst cavities and fractures
- Submarine alteration zones of iron sulfides
- Marine sediments with ferruginous chemical component
Natural dye earth deposits are not very common. To give rise to a natural earth requires not only a high iron content and a suitable mineralogical composition, but above all a suitable structural configuration totally free of polluting impurities. So many minerals that have a high iron content do not possess any coloring properties anyway as well as there are excellent pigments with relatively low iron content.
For those who would like to explore these topics further, we recommend reading the essay “Monografie” by Paolo Scarzella