History of mining in Sardinia

Evidence of ancient metal processing is given in the many placenames connected with mining: examples include Argentiera, Montiferru, Funtana Raminosa, and Capo Ferrato.

The term Gennargentu (silver carrier) comes from Eugenio Marchese, then manager of the mining district of Sardinia, bringing it back to the records of an ancient processing of the precious metal around the village of Talana.

As a matter of fact at least seventy processed hectares of land and about 160 steady or temporary settlements have been found from which obsidian was later exported to Southern France and Northern Italy.

The geographical position of the island and its mining asset, attracted, between the tenth and the 8th century BC, Phoenician merchants, that were replaced by Carthaginians.

Phoenicians and Carthaginians deeply exploited the mining richness, above all in the Iglesiente, where there are some traces of excavations and wastes of fusion ascribable to this period.

Ever since 269 BC the Roman Republic had employed silver as a monetary unit, whereas lead was used in most various fields of civil life, from crockery to water pipes.

The mining industry of the Romans was not limited to the basin of the Iglesiente (Metalla), in fact they knew and definitely exploited rich silver ore bodies of Sarrabus, the importance of which the geographer Solinus was referring to when he wrote: "India ebore, argento Sardinia, Attica melle" ("India is famous for ivory, Sardinia for silver and Attica for honey").

The mining development in the Roman era consisted mainly of excavations and shafts — some more than one hundred meters deep — using hand tools and sometimes fire-setting to shatter rocks.

During the Byzantine rule the mining industry and the metal working activity scored a certain rebirth and silver became again one of the most important export products of Sardinia, although around 700AD trade traffic in the Mediterranean Sea became somewhat difficult because of the plunderings of the Arabs.

For Sardinia the steady plunderings of the Arabs along the coast had been, for a long spell of time, an impending danger that provoked the depopulation of wide coastal areas and the migration of the people towards the inner side of the island.

In 1131 the judge Gonario II of Torres donated half of the Argentiera of the Nurra to the primatial church of Santa Maria of Pisa, as evidence of the ever-closer political links between the weak Sardinian States and the Tuscan comune.

At the beginning of the 9th century in fact, under the patronage of the Papal Court, that was then ruled by Benedict XIII, in Sardinian history the two Maritime republics of Genoa and Pisa, that were at first allied against the Muslim emir Musa who had taken possession of some areas of the island, were afterwards competing for the dominion on the weak judge states.

The Pisan family of the Counts of Donoratico, embodied by Ugolino della Gherardesca, enhanced a new start for the mining industry in his dominions in Sardinia and particularly in what is now Iglesiente.

Ugolino operated on a territory of about 590 square kilometers (230 sq mi), called Argentaria del Sigerro for the richness of its underground in silver minerals.

The strong mining industry, just like political, economic and social life, was ruled by some laws that were gathered in a codex divided into four books, better known as Breve di Villa Chiesa.

Everyone in the territory of the Argentiera could undertake a mining industry, often for this purpose some companies whose participants (parsonavili) possessed quotations of society (trente) were founded.

The loss of the island, but first of all of its silver mines, was the commencing of the fall of the Tuscan city that was pressed on the continent by its rivals Lucca and Florence.

Following the total conquest of the island, the Aragonese tried to enhance the silver mining industry: duties were lightened and also taxes and rights owed to the crown for metals.

Among them there was also the French novelist Honoré de Balzac who in 1838 started off a disastrous enterprise that had the purpose of exploiting ancient lead-bearing wastes of the Nurra.

The new act eased the achievement of mining concessions, calling back onto the island many managers, particularly from Liguria, Piedmont, and the first Societies, with the purpose of exploiting the promising Sardinian ore bodies.

A remarkable exception was the Sardinian manager Giovanni Antonio Sanna, who achieved in 1848 a perpetual concession on about 1200 hectares located in the area of Montavecchio.

In 1858 the exile Enrico Serpieri from the Romagna founded the foundry of Domusnovas for the exploitation of lead mineral in previously processed waste and not so much later of a second one in Fluminimaggiore.

Since 1850 limited groups of specialised workers from Styria, Austria, followed by German miners from Freiburg began to settle temporarily in the Iglesiente in particular in the mining areas of Monte Vecchio, Guspini and Ingurtosu .

[4][citation not found] The contemporaneous migration flow from the Italian peninsula towards the Sardinian mining areas of Iglesiente was more considerable and more stable; these miners came mostly from Lombardy, Piedmont, Tuscany and Romagna.

[5] According to an 1882 census realised by the French engineer Leon Goüine, in the south-western Sardinian mines worked 9.780 miners, 3.571 of which were of mainland Italian origin;[6] most of them settled in Iglesias and frazioni .

In 1867 Sardinian members of parliament asked Prime Minister Bettino Ricasoli for a greater commitment of the State to alleviate poverty conditions of the people on the island.

The steady development of mining industry led to the flow of technicians (engineers and geologists) and board employees from other regions of the kingdom.

Sella's inquiry did not reveal the economic treatment inequities between Sardinian miners and those with a continental origin, not to mention the need to found a school for foundrymen and mining managers in Iglesias.

In 1851 the Genuese company "Unione Sulcis e Sarrabus" acquired the research permits in the area of Monte Narba, in the comune of San Vito.

In its most flourishing period the ore body of the Sarrabus employed up to 1500 workers, distributed among the mines of Masaloni, Giovanni Bonu, Monte Narba, Per'Arba, Baccu Arrodas, Tuviois, S'erra e S'Ilixi and Nicola Secci.