1911Matthias Gasteiger begins activities in Lasa

The sculptor and professor Matthias Gasteiger came from a peasant family in Val Pusteria. Born in 1871 in Munich, he had attended the art academy in that city and had been a pupil of Victor Tilgner in Vienna at the time when the latter was working on Mozart’s monument in Burggarten, created with marble from Lasa.

In 1904, Gasteiger started a marble extraction activity in a quarry on the Giura Francone and in 1911 he came to Lasa. Gasteiger’s medium-term interest was the development, in Lasa, of a marble company with all the possible infrastructure and mining rights. He wanted to create an attractive source of investment that could be sold to wealthy buyers in the future. World War I thwarted his plans.