A friendly explainer of a small-town economy
This site exists to help visitors understand how Follonica, on the Tuscan coast of Italy, actually makes its living — with a bias toward data, a love of history, and just enough play to make it stick.
What you'll find here
- Economy — the three economic levels, the main industries and the seasonal, iron-rooted history behind them.
- Surroundings — the Gulf, the Maremma, the mining hills and the neighbouring towns that share the economy.
- Future — the trends likely to reshape the town over the next generation.
- Game — “Mayor of the Gulf”, a ten-season balancing act that turns the site's ideas into decisions.
Who it's for
Curious visitors, students, second-home owners and anyone who has ever wondered what a beautiful beach town does for money in February. No economics background required — every chart is captioned and every term explained in plain language.
About Follonica
Follonica is a coastal town of roughly twenty-one thousand residents in the province of Grosseto, in the Maremma region of Tuscany. It grew in the nineteenth century around grand-ducal iron foundries fed by ore from the island of Elba and the nearby Metalliferous Hills — a rare Italian example of an industrial town that later became a holiday one. Today its economy is built on summer tourism, services and the enduring appeal of its gulf, beaches and pinewoods.
How it's built
Deliberately simple. The site is static HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript — no framework, no build step — designed to be hosted on Cloudflare Pages. The charts are hand-rolled SVG that read their data straight from the page markup and re-colour themselves for light or dark mode. That keeps the whole thing fast, portable and easy to edit.
About the data
Every figure on the site is a rounded, representative estimate assembled for teaching, not an official statistic. The full explanation and source list lives in the data note. If you'd like to make the numbers authoritative, the project README explains exactly where to drop verified figures.