Luserna stone is a schistose metamorphic rock belonging to the gneiss group. It is quarried in the Cottian Prealps of west-central Piedmont, between the Pellice Valley and the Po Valley, in the municipalities of Luserna San Giovanni, Rorà, Bagnolo Piemonte and Barge, for which it has always represented an important economic resource.

Its use is very ancient and still characterises the building style and street furniture of its home area and of the whole of Piedmont, from where, starting in the 1970s, it spread both nationally and internationally.

Luserna stone, whose quarrying is documented from the mid-17th century, has been used as a building material since the most remote times, including as a masonry element. The typical process was, and partly still is today, splitting the blocks into slabs and then squaring them into products for urban paving (slabs, kerbstones, gutters, etc.), for actual construction (balcony slabs, corbels, steps, risers, thresholds, jambs and lintels), for roofing (the famous stone roof tiles known as “lose”) and for funerary architecture. As early as the 17th century, Luserna stone was put to noble uses, such as the outdoor paving of the royal palaces of Turin, Racconigi and Venaria Reale, to name only the best known.

Another very important use is the stone-tile roofing commissioned by architect Alessandro Antonelli for the Mole Antonelliana in Turin, in whose structure slabs — still visible today — were set between courses of brick to give greater strength to the building which, at the time of its construction, was the tallest masonry building in the world. More generally, it appears that between the two World Wars of the 20th century, 90% of Turin’s staircases and pavements were made of Luserna stone.

From the late 1960s, the introduction of frame and diamond-disc sawing profoundly transformed the production process. Today, sound and compact blocks, unsuitable for splitting, are sawn, while the resulting slabs are flamed, antiqued, or ground and polished.

The squaring of the slabs, as well as edge-working, is now carried out entirely with the help of mechanical and/or numerically-controlled equipment and diamond tools. Important works in Luserna stone have been carried out, besides in many Italian cities, also in many European and non-European countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan, Thailand and Australia.