The Consortium for the Apuan Industrial Zone (Z.I.A.) is a public body commissioned by a special State Law in 1947 and recognized by Art. 36 of the Law 317 of 1991 as a Public Economic Board. The founding law attributes to the Consortiium Z.I.A. direct competence over a specific area of about 822 hectares, the Apuan Industrial Zone, strictly speaking, laid out over territory confining on the communes of Massa and Carrara, and more in general over all the industrial areas belonging to all the associated communes of Lunigiana and Versilia.

The primary industrialization of the Apuan Industrial Zone took place in the period before the second world war without any real coordination and essentially in order to give the central Government certain local advantages. This was followed by the installation of a number of companies belonging to large national groups, above all in the chemical and metal and mechanical sector, and by a series of initiatives of smaller dimensions, without any real coordination with the first – the result being that the Industrial Zone had weak internal interrelations and was incapable, therefore, of giving any propulsion of its own towards development.
Before 8th September 1943 there were 44 establishments active with a total of 7,902 workers in all. The renewal of activity after the war was likewise connected with the return of fiscal and tariff amenities which allowed for the recreation of an industrial situation on the almost exclusive basis of the resumption of work in the existing settlements, even if the workforce occupied in 1956 (the expiry of all the facilities) was still 1,500 workers short of the 1943 figure.

The following years were ones of great success for national industries, but the Apuan Industrial Zone did not have the same qualitative development on account of the limited ability of the big companies to generate successive collateral and complementary initiatives able to create and strengthen an interconnected productive system.
The best period registered for the activities of the Z.I.A. were the seventies, with growth in both the number of production plants and their relative employees. Employment went above the pre-war levels for the first time in 1970, with 8,504 employees divided into 129 enterprises, while the year of the maximum historical level of employment gives figures of great polarity in the productive structures: two thirds of the 9,797 workers were concentrated in just 6% of the 239 establishments present.

In the Eighties and the Nineties the Apuan Industrial Zone went through an extraordinary and – from the point of view of its effects on employment, for example – a dramatic restructuring process, distinguished in its first ten years by its industrial decline and then in the following decade by the building up of a productive centre heavily based on small and medium-sized local businesses. At the end of the eighties, after the closure of the big factories, which were mostly partly state owned, the 333 active establishments gave work to a ‘mere’ 6,781 people, a decline of 3,000 direct employees when compared to the preceding decade, while there were over 2 million square metres of industrial area to be reclaimed and put back to use.

The reindustrialisation process that took place in the following ten years concerned the establishment of small, primarily local companies, so much so that the total number of establishments almost doubled, reaching 587 in 1999, while employment began to grow again with the almost exclusive contribution of smaller businesses.

Even if with some delay in comparison to the rest of Italy, but in any case with significant acceleration during the last twenty years, the mechanisms of re-conversion and disintegration of the large scale companies are now well underway even in the ZIA. This, and the parallel multiplication and agglomeration on the territory of local small and medium-sized industries, make it possible to speak about the present Apuan Industrial Zone as a ‘territorial system of companies’.

Employment situation in the Z.I.A.

Most important free industrial areas in the coastal zone

For more information:
www.consorzio.zia.ms.it