The Aeolian Islands were a hungry paradise. Nothing to do with what we see today: a rich tourism paradise, embellished with quality agricultural products, located on the main floor of the Unesco sites, a world heritage site. At one time there was, perhaps, only one wealth, pride and wonder: the white gold of pumice. Daughter of the volcano, pumice is a precious material for the most diverse uses: from construction to cosmetics. In 1960, the Messina poet Bartolo Cattafi said, on the northern side of the island of Lipari worked at least a thousand workers (the quarrymen) for the extraction of at least two million quintals of pumice a year. The last employees (31) of the last pumice quarry of the Aeolian Islands, closed definitively in 2007, were definitively hired a few weeks ago by Resais, a glorious body of the Sicilian Region that has become a vehicle for years to give a decent contractual footing to this or that worker. socially useful survivor of one of the many corporate crises.
It is a piece of heritage (human, professional) and it is a piece of our history that ends. And the history of the pumice quarrymen of Lipari risks ending up in oblivion, just as a collective removal mechanism wants to eliminate from memory those white quarries that still today tourists, from the sea, continue to look on with wonder and that still today remain a destination for families. and throngs of tourists who come there to swim. Today there is nothing left of that human and industrial heritage except the bitterness of Enzo D’Ambra, the last owner of Pumex, a company founded in 1958, before the closure of the quarries and the subsequent bankruptcy of the company. It was D’Ambra himself who presented an integrated project that involved the redevelopment of the quarry area, the creation of a training and research center entrusted to Sicilian universities and a business museum “but I never got any answers” he says today. D’Ambra with bitterness. «To date the area is prey to vandals, couples looking for a quiet place to seclude themselves, graffiti artists and unfortunately a shady little shop. The quarry abandoned to itself, without a cover of soil and hard rocks, is at high risk of landslide which, should it occur, would collapse on the road below, blocking much of the island’s circulation, geologists say. Perhaps the most pressing problem for citizens is that the structures that should be well closed by the seals of the Barcelona Pozzo di Gotto court are completely accessible to anyone without a minimum of effort and extremely unsafe “, wrote the writer Carlo on the narrarestoria.it website. Cavazzuti. And it is from here, from these disastrous fixed points, that we can start to save what can be saved by avoiding the total dismemberment of the quarry, the laboratories, the offices, the machinery, of all that is in short the connective tissue of this company.
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The museum of industry and work in the Aeolian Islands, right in the pumice quarries, is now a proposal made by Antonio Calabrò, president of Museimpresa, taken up by Enzo Cancellato, president of Federculture, by Franco Iseppi, president of the Touring Club and by Gianni Puglisi, honorary president of Unesco Italy and which is now being relaunched by Gregory Bongiorno, president of Sicindustria, the Confindustria association of 7 of the 9 Sicilian provinces: “A business museum dedicated to the Lipari pumice quarry is not only appropriate but important for several reasons: one is represented by the memory of the industrial history of our island for what that productive settlement has represented over the years; another is that of the return which this can mean in cultural, tourist and therefore economic terms. You can start from Lipari to continue with many other Sicilian quarries and companies and build a network of business museums on the island. It is a project to work on: in the next few days I will make the proposal to the councilor for cultural heritage Alberto Samonà ». An initiative that would also bring another result: to make a productive and non-parasitic dimension of Sicily plastically visible. In spite of commonplaces. The resources are there, the will is needed. For example, the sums deriving from concession and extractive fees paid by companies in the sector could be used. Perhaps not a duty but certainly a necessity to defeat addiction: «The main enemy of memory is oblivion, but it is not the most dangerous. The most dangerous enemy of memory is getting used to inheriting the assets of our fathers – adds Bongiorno, quoting Pope Francis -. If there is one thing I fear more than oblivion it is addiction. Get used to what we have, to the beauty that surrounds us, to the riches that belong to us. This is how we slowly slide towards oblivion. In an irreversible process made up of small portions of daily abandonment that in Lipari, is swallowing the testimony of what was the industrial vocation of the island. A world, that of the company, which has a beating heart made up of all the men and women who have passed from that company, made up of stories, joys and pains, anxieties and disappointments, tangible signs and atmospheres that they can relive in what can become a widespread mining museum ».