PORTO FLAVIA: SOMETHING YOU CAN NOT MISS IN SARDINIA

PORTO FLAVIA: SOMETHING YOU CAN NOT MISS IN SARDINIA

"It is a sort of Stendhal syndrome, that in which one feels disoriented before something of great beauty, which befalls whosoever takes a ride up the southwest coastline from Funtanamare to Nebida and Masua: the scenery penetrates into the soul.. A primordial vision awakens memories buried in our collective unconscious: the sea reflecting shades of sapphire and emerald, cobalt and turquoise, those vertical cliffs and, above all, the Pan di Zucchero, that rises up the distance. It is 134 metres tall: a block of limestone which broke off from Mother Earth millions of years ago.

Geologists and palaeontologists from the US, from Australia and Germany come to study the rre rocks like Puddinga Ordoviciana, or the trilobites, fossils from the Cambrian period (500 milion years ago).

Here a jewel of industrial achitecture alone make the trip worthwhile: Porto Flavia.

In the 1922 the engineer Cesare Vecelli, who worked for the Belgian company Vielle Montaigne was called to solve the everonerous problem of transportation. Before then the minerals were hand-loades onto the sailboats then shipped to San Pietro island, where there was the only nearby safe port.

Cesare Vecelli build a Port inside the Mountain. Porto Flavia has two tunnels dug into the mountain in front of Pan di Zuccchero. The minerals arrived in the upper one in train-carts and were then sent down to the lower one through nine silos with a capacity of 10.000 tons. from there a conveyor belt loades them onto big merchan ships which were able to berth along the coast for the time necessary for the operation.

Today it is an unforgettable experience to see it from the sea; and even more so to penetrate into the dark bowels of the mountain to then suddenly come out into the sunlight in front of the immense blue and the spectacular Pan di Zucchero."

da „Miniere al sole“ di Susanna Lavazza

 

 

 

 

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