Ancient Yellow of Castronovo
Chosen by Vanvitelli for the colonnade of the chapel of the Royal Palace of Caserta
Castronovo Yellow is today among the rarest and most precious marbles in the world.
The Kassar Plateau
The ancient yellow of Sicily is a marble that was quarried in the past in Castronovo, on the Kassar plateau. Today the quarry is exhausted and closed.
Unique in the world
We are the only company in the world that still has blocks of Castronovo yellow, which are mostly used for making restorations and inlays and exceptionally for making small objects.
Castronovo yellow is a very fine-grained and homogeneous deep-sea carbonate sedimentary rock consisting of yellow-colored microcrystalline calcite (micrite), marked by a network of brown veins due to brittle tectonics and sometimes characterized by recrystallization of spathic calcite with formation of white patches and/or lines with often blurred contacts. The lithotype belongs to the geologic formation locally called "lattimusa" of Jurassic-superior/Cretaceous-lower age, recognizable under the microscope by the presence of abundant fossil remains not visible to the naked eye. In the Castronovo area and particularly in the cassaro (kassar) plateau there are levels with a discontinuous trend in which the rock takes on various shades of yellow at clay interlayers rich in iron oxides and hydroxides. The mining site, which is no longer active today, was identified at 850m above sea level.
From the Kassar marble quarries of Castronovo were taken the 98 columns (each 15 meters long) and ciborium that adorn the majestic portico and palatine chapel of the Royal Palace of Caserta, a masterpiece of architect Luigi Vanvitelli. Charles III of Bourbon and Queen Mary in 1752 commissioned the geologist Abbot Don Giovanni Battista Vaccarini to carry out the quarrying. The yellow marble was used by the same abbot Vaccarini to decorate the interior of another very important church, the Badia di Sant'Agata in Catania.
We are the only company in the world that still owns blocks of Castronovo yellow, which are mostly used for restoration and inlay work and exceptionally for making unique and exclusive objects.
Royal Palace of Caserta
Palatine Chapel
Colonnade in Castronovo yellow
COLUMN
cOLONNA
