Italy, Allumiere

Just north of Rome, at the foot of the Tolfa, Allumiere was a place devoted to agriculture and pastoralism since the Etruscan and Roman period until 1500, when it became one of the strategic places of the Papal States. The story began with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the need to find deposits of alum, a mineral used in medicine, leather and paper industries. In this area deposits were discovered and in 1500 Agostino Chigi, who had managed the area, built workers' houses, a village, an aqueduct, and so was born Allumiere and it immediately became an important urban-industrial center. Revenues were so large that they enabled Pope Pius V to finance the war against the Turks. In the three centuries of open pit excavations, the territory of Allumiere has been altered and has created a new special morphology.