Postcards from the mine

The photos that tell the story. And the testimonies that reconstruct a world of work and toil and of a shattered dream. The one in the mines as told by the protagonists forty years after the shutdown of the plants and the 'closure' of the galleries of Funtana Raminosa at Gadoni in the province of Nuoro.

Recalling the mining, political, social and economic experience is the book 'Funtana Raminosa, wandering through the tunnels lost in oblivion', by Gabriele Calvisi, a mining engineer with long experience in the mining world. In the 280 pages, he reconstructs not only the life of a mine, but also a microcosm made up of work, solidarity, commitment and struggles to avert closure and get revitalisation projects off the ground.

Not a celebration, but a milestone. A sign before time and silence erase what still resists. "The book aims to be an act of testimony, of self-recognition of a mining, political, social and cultural experience, tracing the fragmented recurrences of the last years of the mine to find in the present a sense of the past," the author writes in the presentation. It is not a history book, nor an artistic one, nor does it claim to exhaustively document the last fifty years of the Funtana Raminosa mine'.

In the shots that accompany the reader on this journey, there are images from thirty and forty years ago, with workers engaged in the various construction sites and activities preparatory to the relaunch of the site from which copper was extracted. A dream, fuelled by the construction of a large ore processing plant and then vanished with the collapse of the market. In this journey there are also today's snapshots of abandoned construction sites, crumbling and decaying structures. And the writings: Salvatore Cherchi, with his talk 'Who betrayed the miners' reconstructs the political and social scenario, Gianbattista Novella, his life as a geologist and Sandro Putzolu with his 'Diary of an engineer fascinated by the mines' relives the years and hopes of those places. Andreano Madeddu recounts 'The decision of the end and the memory of a tragedy', Matteo Cara 'That invisible landscape preserved in memory'. Then there is the sign. It is that of Gabriele Calvisi, who recounts the reasons for this journey conceived during the pandemic. "I wanted to revisit the walls of the houses I lived in where the families of the miners, the directors and the technicians who worked there lived,' he writes.

Amongst the loving memories left behind I got lost...I saw what has been transformed into a 'mining' museum, I hope it can be visited with continuity...I walked down the Brebegariu ramp in silent trepidation. About seventy metres from the entrance I left a rose for Bruno, Sandro, Antonio, forever in my memories'.