Natural stone and the history of Chiampo Valley

Natural stone: this charming element, so resistant as to represent a challenge for man, but which at the same time can be plied by his hand and will and by his knowledge and art, is the leading thread of the entire human and professional story of the Bevilacqua family from Chiampo, the valley located in the North-East of Italy where Lithos Design was born.

The Chiampo valley is the birthplace of the worldwide-known marble of the same name that used to be extracted here, whose very peculiar light pink colour is precisely the colour of our mountains. In local history, for the young living here a job in the quarry had always been “the” profession to get and learn, and in the ’60s the local industrial tradition was already devoted to marble processing (together with weaving). It is the path my grandfather and my father undertook, and they always subsisted on this material: it gave them the possibility to sustain their families and raise their children – as it was also for many other families living here. My father started as a stone mason and went on to the foundation of the company that would become the family’s activity, together with his brother.

“If you feel you know the Craft – say my uncle Lino and my father Luciano recalling those days – you have a duty to go further. A duty towards yourself, but also towards the Craft itself”.

This same impulse moved my brother Alberto and I, when we met designer Raffaello Galiotto and his experimental ideas about natural stone, to reinvest our experience and tradition in something completely innovative, which would be the Lithos Design project. Our passion for stone is an unforgettable inheritance we received from our very territory, about which there are lots of interesting things to tell… and we will, step by step, in this place of ours.