Italy's natural resources

Italy has numerous natural resources that have traditionally been important to its economy, and some associated industries remain vital. It is one of the world’s leading producers of wine, olive oil, and cheese; olive trees and vineyards can be found throughout the country. The town of Carrara is world famous for the quality of its marble deposits.

The Country

A founding member of the European Union, Italy became a nation-state in 1861 and a republic in 1946. Italy is a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea in southern Europe. The country comprises a boot-shaped mainland, the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, and several smaller islands. Italy shares borders with Austria, Switzerland, France, San Marino, and Slovenia. Natural threats to the nation include earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, mudslides, and avalanches, along with land subsidence in Venice. Three-quarters of the country is mountainous; the Alps stretch across the northern region, and the Apennines run southward along the peninsula. The southern area of the country has four active volcanoes, including Mount Vesuvius and Mount Etna.

In 2023, Italy had one of the largest economies in the world, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of $3.097 trillion. The country is known for its cuisine, wine, cheese, olive oil, and marble. Italy has played a large role in European and global history. Home to the ancient civilizations of the Etruscans and later the Romans, Italy has been influential in the fields of architecture, literature, painting, sculpture, science, education, government, philosophy, music, and fashion.

Olive Oil

Italy is one of the leading producers of olive oil in the world. Fossils of olive trees have been found in Italy dating back 20 million years. The culture of producing olive oil, however, did not emerge in the area until much later. The spread of the Greek empire brought olives to southern Italy in the eighth century BCE. The Romans planted olive trees throughout the Mediterranean region. Ancient historians wrote about Italian olive oil as being reasonably priced and the best in the Mediterranean. Olive oil was a main ingredient in various ointments and was believed to increase strength and youthfulness. Leading producers of extra virgin olive oil are the regions of Liguria, Tuscany, Umbria, and Apulia. One-third of Italy’s olive oil trees are in the Apulia region. The taste and quality of the oil is affected by the type of olives, climate and conditions where they are grown, the method of harvest, and the production process.

The Italian government strictly controls the extra virgin olive oil industry; in order to earn the distinction of extra virgin the oil must have an acidity level of less than 1 percent. Olive oil from Italy is among the highest priced and most in demand around the world. This has led companies to mix lower quality oil with Italian oil in order to produce a cheaper product; the oil is then labeled as being imported from Italy. Periodically, crackdowns on such counterfeit operations are reported, with the Italian government conducting arrests and confiscating mislabeled oil.

Marble

Carrara, located in the Apuan Alps in northwestern Tuscany, is the marble capital of Italy. It produces one-third of all the marble quarried in Italy. The area was first mined by the Romans, who used slaves and convicts to extract the rock. They would insert damp wooden wedges into existing cracking in the rock face; the wood would then expand, loosening the marble. In 1570, gunpowder was first used in Carrara to extract marble from the mountainside. Explosives drastically changed the landscape of the area as more quarries opened and larger chunks of marble were extracted. A hydroelectric plant was built nearby in 1910, which allowed the quarries to use electricity for the first time.

Several varieties of marble are mined in the area, including the uncommonly white, flawless marble for which the town is famous. The port of Marina di Carrara is one of the most famous in Italy and is known worldwide for loading and unloading marble and granite. During the early sixteenth century, sculptor Michelangelo (1475-1564) traveled often to the quarries to pick out marble for his projects, including David. Carrara marble was used to build the Pantheon, Trajan’s Column in Rome, the Marble Arch in London, and the Cathedral of Siena. The stone is also used as a facade for buildings worldwide. Carrara is home to many fairs that celebrate marble and quarrying. In 1982, the town opened the Marble Museum of Carrara to preserve the history of marble and the marble industry in the area. The museum has several sections, including archaeological relics, drawings, photographs, plaster casts, sculptures, and industrial artwork. It also tells the history of marble quarrying and has machinery, technical diagrams, and photographs. The gallery contains more than three hundred samples of marble, granite, and rock from Italy and elsewhere.

Feldspar

The group of minerals known as feldspars compose up to 60 percent of the Earth’s crust. The mineral can be found as crystals in granite or other igneous rock, in sedimentary rocks, in metamorphic rocks, or in veins. Feldspars are often pink, white, gray, or brown. The color varies with the chemical composition of the mineral. Feldspars are used in glassmaking, tile, ceramics, abrasive cleaners, and many other products. Italy was the leading feldspar producer throughout the 1990s, vastly outmining the rest of the world. By 2019, Italy was producing almost 4 million metric tons of feldspar. At that time, Italy’s tile industry was among the top in the world, and the ceramics industry was among the leaders in Europe.

The Maffei Sarda company began mining feldspar in northern Sardinia in 1989. In the late 1990s, the company began producing a soda-potash feldspar that is unusually white in color and has been used to make bone china. At the time, another mining company developed a process to extract feldspar from granite that it recovered from a mining dump in Italy’s Lake Maggiore region. Italy’s yearly production of feldspar continued to increase and the country became one of the world's top producers.

Metal and Mineral Resources

Italy mines a variety of metals, including copper, lead, zinc, gold, and mercury. The majority of mining companies and mines are government controlled. Some privatization of the industry began during the 1990s. During the 1970s, Italy was a leading producer of pyrites, fluorite, salt, and asbestos. The country also mined enough zinc, sulfur, lead, and aluminum to meet its own demand. However, less than two decades later, Italy had drastically depleted these resources and was no longer self-sufficient.

Traditionally much of the country’s iron production was from Elba Island. The last iron cave was closed there in 1981. The island is also home to the Mining Museum. The museum has more than one thousand rocks and minerals on display and allows visitors to tour a mine. The majority of Italy’s metals are found on its islands; the decline of mining and depletion of the deposits have severely impacted their economies.

Between World Wars I and II Italy controlled one of the world's largest and longest-running mercury mines, in Idrija, Slovenia. The Idrija mine was in operation by the time Christopher Columbus set sail for the West Indies in 1492. Mercury was first exported through Venice, followed by Amsterdam in 1659. After more than five hundred years in operation, the mine was shut down because of declining mercury ore prices. Mercury is still found in the Lake Maggiore region of Italy.

Coal

The island of Sardinia has a long history of coal mining. During the fascist period, a large number of the island’s swamplands were drained to produce farmable land. Several agrarian communities began to form in these areas. At this time, the city of Carbonia was also established, which became the mining center of Sardinia. Tourism increased on the island by the early 1950s, which led to a decrease in coal mining. By 2007, the Miniera Monte Sinni mine, located in the Sulcis basin in southwestern Sardinia, was the only active underground coal mine in Italy. It produced on average only 90,000 metric tons of coal each year.

Italy, however, has large coal reserves: an estimated 609.999 million metric tons in 2022, according to the World Factbook. However, the growing demand for power sources has increased Italy’s dependence on coal. The use of coal has met some political opposition but is aided by advances in the "clean coal" industry. In 2008, Italy’s largest power company, Enel, converted a large power plant located northwest of Rome, in Civitavecchia, from oil to coal. The company defended this move as a means to lower costs; fuel costs had risen 151 percent since 1996. Italy had some of the highest electricity prices in Europe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In 2022, Italy produced 1.618 million metric tons of coal.

Wine

The Etruscans, who were located in what is now northern Italy, and the Greek colonists to the south began Italy’s long history with winemaking. After taking control of the area, the Romans started their own vineyards. Winemaking in the Roman Empire was a large enterprise and pioneered mass production storage methods like barrel making and bottling. The Romans operated several vineyard plantations manned with slave labor on much of the coastal area of the region. The plantations were so extensive that in 92 CE the emperor had to shut down a number of them in order to use the land for food production.

Today, Italy is one of the leading wine producers in the world. The country produces wines of many flavors, colors, and styles from approximately one million vineyards. Italy has twenty wine regions, which are also its political districts. The economy of the Apulia region is based primarily on wine, with over 106,000 hectares of grapes and a yearly output of approximately 723.7 million liters of wine. The islands of Sardinia and Sicily are also major wine producers. Tuscany is famous for its red wines, which account for about 70 percent of its production. The region has more than 63,537 hectares of vineyards. Starting in 1968, winemakers began producing "super Tuscans," wines that are not mixed according to the traditional blending laws of the area. During the 1970s, Tignanello became one of the first super Tuscans by eliminating the white grapes from a recipe for chianti. Piero Antinori replaced them with red Bordeaux grapes in order to produce a richer wine. Such wines do not fit into any of the four traditional categories in which Italian wine is classified. However, winemakers throughout the country continue to experiment and create new wines.

Fish

Even though the majority of fish and seafood consumed in Italy is imported, fish production in the country has risen since the 1960s. During the mid-1980s the European Union passed the Common Fisheries Policy. The policy is designed to eliminate overfishing and maintain a competitive fish and seafood industry within Europe. In 2002, a European Union commission reduced the catch limits on the number of cod and other species of fish that had dwindling numbers. In 2004, subsidies for fishers to help procure new vessels were eliminated. Because of this, the number of Italian fishing ships has decreased, leaving mostly small-scale fishing operations. The northern region of Italy houses the majority of the country’s fish farms. These fisheries produce hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fish annually.

Other Resources

In addition to olives and grapes, Italy is famous worldwide for its cheeses. The country produces more than four hundred different varieties of cheese. In 2008, the government purchased 200,000 wheels of cheese (29.9 kilograms each) to help feed the poor, as food lines and the number of needy grew in the major cities. Italy is also a major exporter of rice and tomatoes. During the late twentieth century, tomato farms doubled in size, and production quadrupled. Northern Italy grows three times the amount of wheat as the southern regions, which is used to make pizza crusts and pasta. The country consumes a large portion of the agricultural products that it produces. Eighty percent of Italy’s citrus fruit is grown in Sicily. Italy is also a leading producer of apples, oranges, lemons, pears, and other fruits as well as flowers and vegetables.

Other Italian natural resources include potash, which can be various chemical compounds, mostly potassium carbonate. Potassium oxide potash is used in fertilizer. The town of Agrigento in southern Sicily has an economy that is largely based on potash and sulfur mining. The nearby harbor is Italy’s principal sulfur port.

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