The journey through the mining Italy that ReMi, National Network of Mining Parks and Museums of Italy, offers us by means of this publication offers us a unique opportunity to evaluate the enormous amount of work done in recent yearsto convert places that have been marked by the often disruptive consequences of bmining activity, the changing effects of the shape of the landscapes and the many signs of the extreme harshness of working conditionsinto destinations ofcultural attraction and tourist enjoyment.
Each of the 60 sites listed in the publication offers visitors a multi faceted experience of geology, environment, landscape, mining technology, workers’ habitat and ore transport infrastructure. Each of the 60 sites therefore constitutes the attractor of a different kind of tourism, whose motivations, precisely because of their multiple character, must be carefully explored in order to exploit a potential, in terms of impact on the economy of the territory, whose extent and temporal dynamics still remain to be adequately defined.
If the comparison with the levels that mining tourism has reached in other countries of older industrialization authorizes us to believe that we too have the conditions to predict a growth in visitors in Italian mining areas, it is true that the data currently available to assess the actual size of this tourism sector are very poor.The estimates are only circumstantial since, in the absence of specific statistics, the extent of mining tourism can only be indirectly appreciated within more comprehensive tourist sectors.
The available data are often affected by their time irregularity and high level of aggregation. For example, according to a study on Industrial Heritage and Agri/Rural Tourism in Europe (European Parliament, 2013), industrial tourism in Europe in 2012 reached a total of 18 million overnight stays and 146 million visit days. The economic impact was calculated on the basis of the following daily spending capacities: 439 Euro/day for foreign tourists, 220 Euro/day for domestic tourists and 28Euro/day for daily tourists. The global flow for the benefit of local economies has been estimated at 4.1 billion Euros for overnight visitors and 4.1 billion Euros for day tourists.
The data reported should be updated, but it is plausible (at least until 2019) that any changes in recent years have been positive. The problem, as far as we are concerned, is the difficulty of isolating, within this large aggregate, the consistency of mining tourism, which certainly does not represent a minor component of tourism linked to the industrial heritage as a whole.
Another (indirect) indicator of the greater tourist attraction that mining heritage could exert is its increased presence on international cultural heritage lists:
- after the year 2000 the number of mining sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List has increased considerably: Blaenavon Industrial Landscape, Cornwall Mining Landscape, Nord Pas de Calais Mining Basin, les Sites miniers de Wallonie, Almaden and Idrija Mines, Bochnia Mine, Tarnowskie Gory, Erzgebirge/Krušnohoří Mining Region, Ombilin Coal Mining Heritage of Sawahlunto;
- Among the different Theme Routes of the European Route of Industrial Heritage (ERIH), the Mining Theme Route isthe one ith the highest number of members.
- On the basis of this common centrality of the mining heritage in the two associations, a greater convergence of initiatives between ERIH and ReMi to share knowledge and undertake complementary enhancement programs is highly desirable. The establishment, also in Italy, of mining heritage itineraries on the model of the Regional Routes established by ERIH in other European countries could constitute a promising occasion for cooperation.
Mines are therefore, without any shadow of a doubt, one of the strengths of industrial heritage and cultural heritage in general. The reference values of this peculiar heritage are not only ascribable to the technological dimension; they refer to other interpretative profiles, such as anthropological, sociological and naturalistic ones, without the appreciation of which a full understanding of the mining universe is precluded.Only in reference to this interdisciplinary prism is it possible to measure the importance of the work that ReMi has carried out.
In little more than 100 richly illustrated pages (the quality of the images is one of the not secondary merits of the volume) are provided clear identikits of 60 Italian mining sites, which with great agility weave a historical-descriptive profile of the site with useful information on the conditions of visit.
The map with their location is not a mirror of the distribution of the mining heritage: the 60 sites that appear (moreover, concentrated mainly in some regions such as Tuscany, Sardinia, Lombardy) are only a fraction of the over 3,000 sites surveyed by ISPRA. This means at least two things: that the Italian mining heritage is much more widespread than it appears on the map and above all that a large part of it is still to be exploited for tourist purposes.
The merit of this publication does not end, however, in its admirable documentary function. It reveals other aspects of the mining heritage that make it one of the areas where the consequences of the most recent theories of heritage and its conceptual evolution are best revealed.
Today, cultural heritage is conceived less and less as the creation of specialists (understood as arbitrators of last resort of what is and what is not heritage), and more and more as the result of a process ofsocial construction in which the decision-makers are no longer the experts, but the communities that elect what is worthy of protection and enhancement on the basis of their own scale of values related to the preservation of their historical identity and social memory.
Nothing like the mining heritage is today a mirror of these trends: in the case of the Italian experience, this is demonstrated by the extraordinary success of an annual event – the Mining Day – whose tenth anniversary is worthily celebrated in this volume with a map of the initiatives that have taken place over the past decade and with a graph that bears witness, year after year, to the growing public participation in locally organized events.
A second aspect that distinguishesthe mining heritage concerns the location of the sites, generally far from large urban centres; their tourist enhancement istherefore a valuable opportunity for he development and revival of the local economy in a green key.
Finally, the third aspect of originality of the mining heritage is linked to its connection with the landscape. A connection made evident, as this publication clearly shows, by the fact that many of the sites listed belong to 4 major national mining parks, established in order to enhance the multiple character of these assets, where the mining industry, but also the geology, the natura environment, and especially the landscape, certainly counts. It is good to understand the meaning of the latter term, which no longer refers to the notion of static landscape – of the beautiful landscape – made for admiration and contemplated from a privileged point of observation; today the mining landscape has become synonymous with “cultural landscape” (UNESCO, 1992), understood as a form in constant evolution determined by the continuous interaction between environment, technique and history, as a landscape whose aesthetic perception is secondary to the understanding of past human actions that have produced its current morphology and the forces in place that determine its evolution.
The mines are thus at the frontier of a new museography, which stimulates the growth of a different publicin search of experience and not passive observation and that, with the help of effective instruments of interpretation, yearns to measure not only the distance that separates him from a past time (that of the mines), but also how much of that past continues to act as an active force in his present.
Every mining site open to the public today must give itself the means to meet this challenge. The journey through mining Italy that this book offers the reader is also a warning not to forget the exceptional effort of museographic innovation that the enhancement of mining sites of the past requires. This is not a small merit.