Ragusa – The asphalt mines are made up of a particular stone which, if heated, in addition to exhaling a particular scent, becomes malleable and becomes hard once the temperature drops. A stone of soft limestone impregnated with bitumen, or oil. The first request to use the mines was made by three Swiss who asked the Bourbons for permission to work the mines, after which entrepreneurs of different nationalities showed interest in extracting the hydrocarbon and bituminizing the roads.
Until the early 1880s, at least four large industrial companies all interested in the extraction (and some also in the distillation) of asphaltic rock, all foreign companies, flocked to the southern outskirts of the city of Ragusa: the English “Val de Travers “, “Limmer United Limited” and “Henry and Benjamin Aveline”, and the French “Compagnie Nationale pour l’exploitation des Asphalte Naturelle”. A very large asphalt mining basin, which originally extended from the Tabuna district, to the north, near the outskirts of Ragusa and further south to the Streppenosa and Castelluccio districts. An entire mining area exploited industrially since the mid-18th century by Italian, Swiss, German and English companies. Between the last thirty years of the 19th century and the first twenty years of the 20th century, the aforementioned companies (Limmer and Val de Travers merged at the beginning of the century) employed thousands and thousands of workers (pickaxes, miners, kids who in other Sicilian mines were called ” carusi”, carters and overseers) to extract hundreds of thousands of tons of dark rock from quarries and mines, part of which was crushed to be transported to Mazzarelli – by cart – and loaded first onto the barges and then onto the steamers at anchor and destined to Great Britain, France, Germany and the rest of Europe. The remaining part was processed on site to extract the hydrocarbon. A historically documented quote recalls that the first road in the world to be asphalted, as we see all the roads in the world today, was the Rue Bergere in Paris. It had been asphalted with stone and bitumen coming from the Ragusa mines of the Compagnie Nationale pour l’exploitation des Asphalte Naturelle.
At the outbreak of the First World War, the German possessions were requisitioned to be given in concession to the Italian company that more than any other has marked the history of Ragusa asphalt, that is, pitch stone: ABCo.D., acronym for Asfalti Bitumen Liquid Fuels and Derivatives. A closed cycle industrial process, which guaranteed excellent revenues and above all work for thousands of people from Ragusa both directly and indirectly. The ABCD continued to work, although very slowly, even during the second war and until 1968, when the ENI managers arrived and guaranteed the same employment levels and the same investments, but only for about a decade, then choosing to do not work pitch stone any more. An era was coming to an end. Asphalt and pitch stone are now only handled by Ancione and a few craftsmen stimulated by enlightened architects who use pitch stone not only in restoration work, but also in new projects.
