Ilva is a joint-stock company of the Riva Group that mainly deals with the production and transformation of steel. With the name of the original company founded in 1905, it was born on the ashes of the abandoned Italsider. It takes its name from the Latin name of the island of Elba, from which iron ore was extracted which fed the first blast furnaces built in Italy in the late nineteenth century.

The most important Italian plant is located in Taranto, and is the largest industrial complex for steel processing in Europe. Other plants are in Genoa, Novi Ligure (AL), Racconigi (CN), Marghera (VE), Patrica (FR).

Ilva / Italsider was one of the leading Italian steel companies of the 20th century. Its history is almost a hundred years old and began at the beginning of the century to end at the end of the 1980s.

Established on the initiative of industrialists from the north of Italy as ILVA (a name that it later regained since the 1990s), with the birth of IRI, the company then passed under public control, establishing plants in Genoa-Cornigliano, Taranto and Naples-Bagnoli . In the sixties it became one of the largest groups in the state industry.

At the end of the eighties, with the crisis in the steel market, and after various economic and financial hardships - culminating in 1983 in the voluntary liquidation and the consequent sale to Finsider of the shareholding in Nuova Italsider, Italsider was reborn with the establishment of COGEA consortium such as Nuova Italsider Acciaierie di Cornigliano to then be taken over, with the original name of ILVA, by the steel group Riva.

The operation of transferring to private individuals the historic complex - once a giant of the iron and steel industry - has aroused controversy and perplexity, especially among industrial management, public administrators and populations of the areas where the productive settlements were located, areas heavily undermined by industrial pollution caused by the presence of blast furnaces. [no source]

In the nineties, the laborious work of dismantling the production plants began and a reconversion of the areas previously occupied by the iron and steel settlements.

The act of establishing the ILVA, which took place in the Ligurian capital, dates back to 1 February 1905 from the merger of the iron and steel activities of the Elba groups (which operated in Portoferraio), Terni and the Roman family Bondi, which had built a blast furnace in Piombino. The initial social capital was twelve million lire and it was made up of the Siderurgica company of Savona (controlled by the Terni company), the Ligure Metallurgica and, directly, Terni itself. Subsequently it was added to the initial capital - bringing it to twenty million - that of the Elba, whose entry came to complete the corporate structure.

The base group Terni-Elba - active in the field of iron ore extraction especially on the island of Elba - was controlled by members of the Genoese finance [2]. who intended to exploit the facilities planned with the law for the economic revival of Naples - launched in July 1904 - which provided for the installation by 1908 of a large integrated cycle plant in Bagnoli.

Ilva had been set up, with government support, to build the Bagnoli iron and steel pole, as part of plans for the development of industrialization in the Neapolitan developed by the then deputy Francesco Saverio Nitti; this allowed her to receive supplies of iron ore at a reduced price and to enjoy strong customs barriers that protected her from competition from the most efficient foreign steel companies.

Metal plate placed on the Padua-Bologna railway bridge that crosses the Adige river between Granzette, a hamlet of Rovigo, and Boara Pisani.

The dumping action implemented by foreign competitors - which would have been equally harmful eighty years later, decreeing the definitive state of crisis in the steel sector - immediately made it clear that the action of the new company would not have been easy, however.

In the period of the First World War, to take advantage of the opportunities offered by war orders, Ilva was integrated downstream acquiring shipbuilding and aeronautical companies; this required very large investments and consequent debts, which, after the war, put Ilva in serious financial difficulties.