Over 10 million years ago in venturing for the first time into the valley of the river which the Etruscans would later call Lynceus, Oreopithecus bambolii (a pre-hominid found in Tuscany) must have been disconcerted by the hot waters he found gushing from geothermal springs, and which ran all the way to the sea. But it was not until the VII Century B.C. that the Colline Metallifere (meaning ‘Metalliferous Hills’) would become the driving force of one of the most efficient metallurgic civilisations in history, that of the Etruscans. Their agricultural society based on the production of olive oil, cereals and wine was supported by mines for the extraction of iron, tin and, above all, copper, so that in addition to excavating in order to build their world famous necropolises the Etruscans also engaged in mining. In one location in particular chemicals extracted from the waters were used for sealing funeral urns and producing colours. Later the Romans exploited the heat produced by ancient volcanoes with installations and works so well known in antiquity as to be assigned a prominent place in the Tabula Peutingeriana, the most complete Roman cartographic document.
From the III Century A.D. these hot springs rich in salts were put to industrial use for the dying of cloth, but religious and magic elements still played a prevalent role: the last sanctuary built by the Etruscan nation prior to final surrender to the Romans was consecrated to the waters of Populonia. Thus it was amid steam, sulfurous fumaroles and the Earth’s heat that the last of the Etruscans defended the gates to their gods. During the Middle Ages the Boracifera region of Tuscany provided the basis for mercantile activities to flourish in the free communes; large quantities of salts deposited in the so-called lagoni were taken, including sulphur, alum and vitriol needed for textile and pharmaceutical industries. A war was waged for possession of the mines by Lorenzo de’ Medici against Volterra, which led to the notorious sack of the city in 1472, including the destruction of the extractive works.
In 1827 Francesco Larderel effectively closed the early phase of the chemical industry in Tuscany by seeing to the building of large artificial lakes to better exploit the Earth’s heat for the purpose of extracting boron, which formed the early wealth of the area; a whole new city (named Larderello in his honour) arose in the fantastic setting of the hills of Tuscany. In 1832 drilling was begun in order to create artificial fumaroles and artesian bores. The resulting steam was used directly in boilers.
At the close of the XIX Century the first experiments were performed for the exploitation of the kinetic energy of the fumaroles; boilers heated directly from the wells allowed boric acid to be refined for use in the manufacture of various medicinal substances, testifying to the fact that no loss of pressure is registered in the attempt to obtain values greater than that produced by atmospheric pressure. When the first electrical power plant in the world was built in New York, in Larderello machines powered by direct heat from the Earth were already in operation and capable of producing electrical energy.
In 1906 Larderello became the first place anywhere to exploit geothermal energy to produce electrical energy on a commercial basis when Pietro Ginori Conti used natural endogenous steam to power the motors for drilling equipment. Within a few years all forms of energy in the town were derived from endogenous steam. By 1931 the Larderello power plant had a 11,000 kilowatt capacity; the first steam pipes for carrying endogenous fluids from fumaroles to condensation towers made their appearance, which soon became a regular feature of the Colline Metallifere landscape.
Even following wartime destruction which severely damaged the installations Italy managed to maintain its lead position in the production of electrical energy produced from geothermal energy at least until 1955, with a 260,000 kilowatt capacity at Larderello. Italy as a whole currently has 30 geothermal power plants with a total capacity of 559 megawatts, and 206 productive plants located on the Tyrrhenian side of the country from Tuscany in central Italy south to Campania. Twenty percent of Tuscany’s electrical production is of this type, as compared to 2% nationwide. The city of Ferrara farther north relies almost exclusively on this form of energy for home heating. The moderization of facilities, increased knowledge and the overcoming of old problems related to the corrosion of the wells and high temperatures during drilling, make geothermal energy one of the few safe, clean and renewable sources of energy even today. We like to think that the conception of the sacred held by ancient peoples such as the Etruscans has allowed their direct descendants to harness in good conscience the heat from the earth with the same ancestral respect for the natural world.