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There is a land in Verona where the sun spreads over roofs, houses and walls like a gentle brush, colouring everything with an unusual, warmer light that illuminates and does not blind: Lessinia, home of the stone of the same name.
The material – also known as red flake or lastrolare limestone and locally known as Prun stone – comes from the very distant past, the Cretaceous period. Humans have been familiar with it from the very beginning, using it to construct walls, roofs, door posts and fountains and to mark boundaries.
Even today, those who walk around the vineyards or in certain districts of Valpolicella can still see large slabs of stone solidly planted in the ground to protect a field or a vegetable garden or thin layers that make up retaining walls or even votive steles.
Versatile uses that could not remain confined to rural environments and which have found new uses since Roman times: paving, architraves, keystones, columns, monuments, balconies, and fountains – in Verona and beyond.
In particular, in the Romanesque and Renaissance period, this stone embellished masterpieces of religious architecture – the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, the Baptistery of Parma and the Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore in Verona – with light and colour.
Little by little, and thanks to the river routes, the Lessinia stone came down from the mountain districts and spread throughout Italy. A treasure with white-pink reflections that the world has comes to know thanks to the work that craftsmen like the Guardini have been able to make out of this stone.
As the business expanded, the company headquarters also needed a new home and found it in new land purchased in Croce dello Schioppo.
In the 1980s, the children of the founders of the Lessinia stone were involved in making new horizons known. In the great time of Italian marble at home and abroad, the Guardini are in the front row at national fairs, where they present the originality and tradition of this material.
The deep knowledge acquired, together with the special features of the stone itself – customers are impressed by its chromatic characteristics and its resistance to temperature changes and frost – allowed the Guardini to open up to new markets such as the Côte d’Azur.
In the 1990s, the long journey of Lessinia stone into the buildings and onto the streets of the world had just begun…
An offer and customisation made possible not only by the ability to offer the customer a product over which they can ensure total control – from the raw material to the final product – but also by the high technological level achieved by the company, which has been a leader in this type of processing since the beginning. Since the 1980s, it has been able to present a stone processing similar to that normally carried out on the most precious marbles.
