Mastabia Jade - The Twins

The Jade from the Talcum Mine on Alpe Mastabia – Italy

In my contribution to FOJ, Jade News – Fall 2003, I reported about a Talcum Mine in the Italian Alps where an apple yellow-green Nephrite Jade was discovered in the mine tailings.

This was the Talcum mine on Alpe Mastabia in Val Malenco in the Provincia di Sondrio of Italy.

In late summer 1993 fellow FOJ Doug Nichols and I meet Mr. Pietro Nana, the actual discoverer and a avid rock hound, in Sondrio and in Chiesa di Val Malenco just after finishing the visit to the nearby Scortaseo Talc-cum-Jade mine in the Poschiavo Valley of Switzerland. We discussed his discovery in light of the nearby Scortaseo site and were given samples and details of the site.

Based on this information, the analysis of the samples, a review of the literature and contacts with Mr. C.Andreis, writer of a thesis on the Mastabia Talcum mine, Doug completed the publication “Nephrite Jade from Mastabia in Val Malenco”. This paper was published in Journal of Gemmology, 29, 5/6, 305-311 by the Gemmological Association and Gem Testing Laboratory of Great Britain in 2005. There you will find all the details on the local geology, composition and colors.

Due to the location of the site in the Alps at more than 2000m, just a limited time window for its visit is available and only this July our busy schedules allowed us to visit the site...

To read the entire article, please
download the .pdf here. It is a 1.5mb download.

You will need Adobe Acrobat to open the file.

H.Giess and Doug Nichol
August 2005