Gold has always been, since time immemorial, considered by man as the most precious of metals. It was the first metal he knew and worked with. Long before copper and iron. The golden age is then associated, in our imagination, with an era of such prosperity and happiness that is difficult to repeat, an Eden that will never return, a paradise lost. Perhaps this is also due to the fact that, unlike copper and iron, it has never been melted down to make weapons. Just naming it evokes emotions.

It is continuously used as a synonym and metaphor of absolute well-being. Associated not only with material but also spiritual and even existential wealth (“a golden person”, “a golden period”, “a golden opportunity” are common phrases in our lexicon). Symbol of absolute purity. Inextricably linked to religions. The ark of the covenant, in the tradition of the old testament was covered with gold. Not to mention the golden calf. There is also one more aspect to consider: its color. We are obviously talking about yellow gold, the most common and most commercialized in jewelry, which is its original, natural color. A unique color immediately attributable to the sun, the religion of great civilizations (Zoroaster of the Persian empire and Sol Invictus in the Roman empire, just to name a few) as well as the star from which everything on earth was born. But one last and important aspect unequivocally and definitively characterizes its link with the imaginary: gold, all that has been collected and extracted so far and all that still preserved in the bowels of the earth or in the water of rivers, it comes from the stars, from the cosmos, from infinity. Only stellar collapses are able to create gold because there is no geological process capable of developing enough energy to melt the elementary particles that make it up and only in stars of great mass, much larger than our sun to be clear, there are those pressure and temperature conditions leading to nuclear explosions suitable for its formation. This, together with its truly unique properties, explains why its intrinsic value is invariably confused with its symbolic value and makes it the metal par excellence for man. But this also highlights another aspect which is that of its commercial value which, apart from some more or less sensitive declines in the presence of significant political and economic changes or large financial speculations, always obviously of a global nature, has never , over the millennia, suffered a real "debacle". Indeed, in recent years, its value has stabilized at figures never reached before. And this is the reason why it is considered the safe haven par excellence. Yes of course, over time and with an increase in the technological level, it will be possible to exploit deposits whose existence is already known today but which are not, at the moment, considered convenient in terms of the cost-income ratio. In short, the fact that what is there is, and nothing else can be added, makes it (as it has always been, after all) extremely solid and safe from a speculative point of view. And it is however very unlikely that tomorrow in the laboratory we will be able to find that "philosopher's stone" which was the obsession of the alchemists of the Middle Ages, which was supposed to transform "base" metals such as lead or iron into the noblest of them, gold. Its peculiarities are then, as we said, impossible to find all together in any other metal. Its extreme INCORRUTIBILITY (it is only unassailable by aqua regia and cyanide ion) has meant that the vast majority of all the gold put into circulation since the first men is still, in one form or another, still today present. In a jewel rather than in a dental prosthesis or in the components of a mobile phone. Its MALLEABILITY is unique in precious metals. Just think that from a single gram, suitably crushed, a slab of one square meter is obtained. From the same gram of gold it seems that an American laboratory has obtained an invisible thread so thin that it is more than 3 kilometers long. Precisely to increase its hardness in general and its tensile strength (withstanding the maximum elongation force without breaking) in particular, especially in jewellery, it is combined with the so-called base metals which, in addition to making it workable, also determine its color and, in the diversity of their proportions, the carat weight. We therefore have yellow gold (gold + copper + silver + zinc), white gold (gold + palladium, platinum or nickel + copper + zinc) and others until we obtain a fair range of different colors or shades, always changing or increasing the base metals. By increasing or decreasing the proportions of the alloys we have the most common carats, from a maximum of 24 KT (used only for ingots) to a minimum of 8 KT or 333/1000. It is in fact the exact same thing to talk about 18KT gold or 750 gold because 18 is to 24 as 750 is to 1000 as well as on 14KT gold you can easily find the 585 mark and on the 9KT one the number 375. Finally its RARITY. All precious metals are expensive because they are present in limited quantities and difficult to extract, but gold, in this special classification, beats them all by far. Suffice it to say that if iron (the material most present, easy and cheap to extract) is present in the earth's crust in a proportion of 5.6 parts out of 100, gold is with a presence of only 4 parts out of a billion parts. You read that right, four out of a billion. An incredibly small percentage that makes it, together with all its other qualities, so precious and unique.

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