The mines of Montedoro

There was a time, in fact, in which the island experienced its race toyellow gold and that's not an understatement. Since the beginning of the 800th century, a fever similar to the one that struck dreamers in the middle of the century who traveled to distant California to hunt for nuggets, spread in the town of Montedoro. The yellow gold to which they aspired was the sulfur, a mineral as precious as the mythical metal with which it shares only the colour.

Sulfur at the time had an invaluable value above all because it had been discovereddisinfectant effect against a plague that afflicted the entire European continent: thegrapevine powdery mildew.

Throughout the nineteenth century and up to the early twentieth century, Sicily was the first producer of sulfur in the world. The owners of plots of land, from the smallest to the huge estates, enjoyed a period of extraordinary prosperity.

The inhabitants of Montedoro discovered by chance that a wealth of biblical dimensions was hidden in the subsoil of their village: sulfur which, to tell the truth, did not hide its presence, but rather emerged from the earth naturally, fueling the ambitions and dreams of the peasants of the small rural town.

They began to dig everywhere and the Montedoro countryside became an immense tangle of underground tunnels.

The Carusi and the mines of Montedoro

In the midst of the industrial revolution, Montedoro, a small village, became the hub of the continent's economy. It could have been a great story of development for the whole territory and for all the poor farmers used to stealing from the land, with hard work and sweat, the means of sustenance for their families.

In fact, sulfur didn't bring wealth to everyone. Above all, the big landowners benefited from it, while the poor peasants were transformed into poor miners.

The children, the Carusi, whose small physique adapted perfectly to the tunnels of the mines, became an integral part of the extraction process. Real tools that were literally rented out to families.

The pickaxe to whom the owner of the mine contracted thepiecework extraction, stipulated contracts with poor families which gave him the right to dispose of the child in exchange for the daily food of a small sum of money paid at the time of engagement.

The money paid to the family was not intended as compensation, but as an advance of compensation in the event of the child's death. The clause that provided for the payment, in fact, was known as "dead relief".

The family could not get the child back except by repaying the money with interest.

Risks of collapse and damage to crops

The endless tunnels dug into the ground undermined the stability of the houses. In less than ten years, the subsoil of Montedoro was invaded by tunnels and tiny mines while, outdoors, the melting furnaces (calcheroni), built near the houses, poisoned the air with the stinking smoke from the sulfur purification treatment.

Only at a later stage was it established that the ovens should be built at a certain distance from the houses. Until then, sulfur fumes, were a poisonous constant in the life of the inhabitants of Montedoro and all the Sicilian towns where sulfur was extracted.

Anyone who had the opportunity dug tunnels and wells, without caring for the stability of civilian homes. Many of these, due to being too close to the excavations, risked collapsing. Several complaints and numerous protests were raised by the inhabitants to prevent their houses from collapsing due to the greed of landowners, pickaxers and improvised miners.

Agriculture which, until the beginning of the mining era of Montedoro, had been the basis of the local economy, began to suffer the repercussions of extraction and all the operations connected with the sulfur processing.
In fact, the gangue, as the materials extracted in their raw state from the countless mines dug everywhere were called, before being treated in the ovens to separate the sulfur, were piled up without any rules and without any precautions on the land where they freely released the sulfur dioxide .

Documentary sources narrate the disappointment of the inhabitants of Montedoro who repeatedly turned to the prefect and other local authorities to ask for their intervention against the extraction practices considered harmful to agriculture and public health.

The Montedoro mines: the educational park and the Zolfara Museum

Montedoro has not forgotten his mining past, made up of hope, dreams, hard work and pain. On the contrary, it perpetuates its memory with an interesting historical and cultural itinerary which culminates in the Educational Park which contains a astronomical observatory (with planetarium), the Zolfara Museum and the evocative and moving museum houses which keep the aspect of those times unchanged.

Near the most important and ancient mine of Montedoro, the Nadurella, there is the Zolfara Museum where it is possible to retrace the history of the epochal sulfur enterprise following two paths, one internal and one external.
The external path is dedicated to the furnaces in which the mineral was treated and to the wagons that were used to descend into the tunnels. The internal path, on the other hand, hosts a permanent exhibition that collects the photographic evidence and the tools used.

The museum houses, in the heart of Montedoro, preserve the historical memory of the life of its inhabitants. Visiting them means taking a journey through time to touch the habits and conditions in which the farmers of Montedoro lived, who two centuries ago transformed sulfur into miners.