Archaeology and nature: hyblean cultural landscape and territorial ...

vertical reduction of market prices. In 1896, in an attempt to reverse the negative trend, Sicilian producers
decided to form the Anglo-Sicilian Sulfur Company, promoted by British entrepreneurs and Ignazio Florio,
the heir of one of the largest Italian business dynasties of the time [7]. This allowed to stabilize the prices of
sulfur and large mines improved facilities and increased the equipment, thanks to the arrival of technical and
entrepreneurial middle class from northern Italy. The attempt, however laudable and delivering good results,
failed after only ten years: the pressure of American competition meant that the price of sulfur drastically
lowered.
Later, the beginning of World War I made it increasingly difficult to supply the mineral causing that sulfur
American grabbed much of the world market. The ensuing crisis period affecting Sicilian industry became
serious in the 30s, when the global economic crisis strongly penalized the sulfur mines in Sicily until the total
collapse of output during the second conflict. The Sicilian sulfur production recovered slightly after 1943,
when the war ended and only until the early 1950s, a period in which America, engaged in the Korean War,
channeled into the war industry, all its resources.
However, the subsequent revival in U.S. industrial production raked again, all the markets; the competition
by then too strong, led to the final decline of the Sicilian sulfur industry and to the gradual closure of the
mines.
Since the mid-80s, these places, whose importance for Sicily, the associate territories and people is
unquestionable, set off for tragic destinies, made of abandonment and desolation. The economic
speculation, the forced removals of these important expressions of the economy and culture of this land,
caused the subsequent deletion of expressive traits of its cultural identity that only much later, people will try
to reconstruct.
With the Sicilian Regional Law n. 34 of 1988 finally closed, in Sicily, sulfur mining production. In the aim of
preserving the memory of the mining industry and culture in the region and to preserve and protect, at least
in part, the unique environmental heritage and industrial archeology of sulfur, personages from culture, trade
unions and other representative sectors of the society and politics, worked in order to Sicilian legislature
approves another law, the n. 17 of 1991, who identified some mines and mining sites to be transformed into
mining parks, regional museums of the mines and mine-museums.
In the three major sulfur provinces were chosen for this purpose, the following mines: Gessolungo, Trabia-
Tallarita and La Grasta in Caltanissetta; Ciavolotta and Cozzo Disi in Agrigento and, finally, Grottacalda and
Floristella in Enna, one of the most expressive settlements of industrial archeology in southern Italy.
3. The history of place
The Floristella and Grottacalda mining site is located in a large area on the outskirts of the town of Enna.
Surrounded by a remarkable landscape, it forms an equilateral triangle with two other important polarities:
the Pergusa Lake and the Nature Reserve of the Ronza (Fig. 1). The mining site is also located in a basin
where cultural and environmental heritage of international interest seat, such as the Villa Romana del Casale
in Piazza Armerina and the excavations and the archaeological museum of Aidone, where the famous Venus
of Morgantina, returned in 2011 from the Paul Getty Museum in Malibu is hosted. Until 1971, the mines
areas were crossed by the disused railway Dittaino-Piazza Armerina-Caltagirone which stopped for the traffic
of goods and workers in Mulinello, Floristella, and Grottacalda Valguanera (Fig. 2). Next to the now disused
Grottacalda station, 647 meters above sea level, there is a forest green that extends over 1.5 km.
The complex brings together two abandoned sulfur mines with a total surface of 400 acres: of these, one
half, the core of Grottacalda is a private property and the other, the nucleus of Floristella, is owned by the
Sicily's Regional administration (fig. 3).
As documented by the archives of the Royal Corps of Mines of Caltanissetta, Grottacalda started its mining
activities in 1815, even if the sulfur research in this area is thought to date from a period between 1700 and
1750 [8]. Sebastian Mottura, creator and first director of the first Mining School of Italy, founded in 1862 in
Caltanissetta, traveling between 1868 and 1875 to design the first official geological map of Italy
commissioned by the Government, when surveyed areas in central Sicily, wrote that the solfara (sulfur mine)
Galati in Grottacalda was one of the oldest in Sicily. The land belonged to Romualdo Trigona, Prince of St.
Elias, who in 1886 granted the right to carry out extraction activities to Trevella & C company maintaining it
for several years. In 1919 the Società Solfifera Siciliana acquired the concession for extraction and,
subsequently, after its fusion with the Montecatini - Società Generale per l'Industria Mineraria e Chimica
(later Montedison), a perpetual license was required and granted in 1943. The events immediately following
the war caused serious problems in the ordinary development of activities. Due to the lack of electric current,
it was impossible to perform the mine drainage water procedures. A few years later, the Montecatini decided
to abandon the industry and to convert it in an agriculture business, dividing the area into several farms, of
which still remains some witnesses on the façade statements of certain buildings.
1094