A healthy sector

"This is a result that brings the event almost back to pre-pandemic numbers in 2019, after the special online edition in 2020 and the restart in 2021," confirms Federico Bricolo, President of Veronafiere. "The stone sector is back in force at Marmomac: 1,207 exhibiting companies present in the 10 halls and four outdoor areas. Veronafiere thus returns to being a motor that runs at full speed, supporting the international development of an industrial chain and generating economic returns for its city and territory as well".

Internationality at the centre

"At Marmomac we have witnessed the great quantitative and qualitative return of operators from countries such as the United States, Brazil, India and Turkey," explains Maurizio Danese, CEO of Veronafiere, "with numbers that have recovered those of the pre-Covid editions. The figure for foreign attendance assumes even greater relevance if we consider the reduced presence of China, Russia and Ukraine due to the well-known health and geopolitical problems. Also contributing to the internationality of this edition was the investment in the incoming of foreign delegations of top buyers, in collaboration with ICE Agency, MAECI and Confindustria Marmomacchine".

Examples of sustainability

The jewel in the crown is sustainability, not spent in words but tangible not only in production processes and materials but also in Veronafiere's 'Less carpet more trees' initiative: less carpet (reduced by 95 per cent to eliminate 25,000 square metres of floor coverings, equivalent to 20 tonnes of materials) and more trees (200 trees and shrubs in the nearby Santa Teresa park and in the Consorzio Zai area).

The Plus Theatre

The added value of the event was the focus on product and project culture, experimentation, design and professional updating, staged at "The Plus Theatre", a space that hosted exhibitions, conventions and workshops to recount the functional and aesthetic potential of natural stone. In Hall 10, a VIP lounge, restaurant, wine bar and five cultural exhibitions welcomed exhibitors and visitors, telling the story of natural stone and its uses through an itinerary that ideally linked the entire production cycle: from the block extracted in the quarry to the final product. Design, architecture, art, university experimentation and furniture brands offered a careful, homogeneous and future-oriented interpretation of how the stone material lends itself to use in different sectors.

Etica_Litica

ADI, the Association for Industrial Design, through the Veneto and Trentino Alto Adige delegation, presented 'Etica_Litica', a challenge to companies to create prototypes with a single slab, including recycled materials, in order to combine the creativity of industrial design with the issues of sustainability, seriality, ease of transport and location.

Visionary Stone

Raffaello Galiotto, with the exhibition 'Visionary Stone', has promoted the development of experimental works of art in stone worked with numerical technology: digital immateriality with its computational potential combined with the precision and power of machinery to shape the stone body in the search for new expressive languages.

Brand & Stone 4.0

In its fourth edition, 'Brand & Stone 4.0' (conceived and curated by Danilo Di Michele) hosted luxury design companies experimenting with natural stone using new processing techniques. Precious and fascinating, marble interprets the essence of design through a tailor-made collaboration between companies from the Italian district and some of the most prestigious international design companies to realise unique projects to be presented on the market. The focus on architecture was entrusted to the scientific committee of Platform Architecture&Design which, together with Marmomac, set up "Stoneland", a photographic exhibition of projects representative of the use of stone created by 15 important international architecture studios.

Marmomac meets Academies

Dedicated to universities, the "Marmomac meets Academies" review, curated by Giuseppe Fallacara and Domenico Potenza for the exhibition "Italy to be discovered. University research and the landscape of urban public space", with the aim of presenting an itinerary, between stone materials and the urban landscape, on the public space of some Italian provincial realities.