ITALY: Staydown

For 90 years the swarthy men of Cabernardi, their fathers and their grandfathers before them have dug sulphur out of the vine-covered hills around their village. The black-streaked yellow ore has brought them steady jobs, tidy red brick houses and a measure of happiness, but in recent years it has brought a creeping fear: What if the supply of sulphur should run out? As the mine shaft plunged deeper and deeper into the earth, even Cabernardi’s Communists went regularly to the little parish church to pray to St. Barbara that the seam might last forever.

The Second Shift. Two months ago the Montecatini Co., which runs the mine, put a notice on its bulletin board. “Meticulous research,” it read, “has established that the mine, in effect, is exhausted.” Some 860 of Cabernardi’s 1,000 miners would have to be laid off permanently. “Unjust,” cried Communist Miner Gino Santorelli. “Capitalistic maneuvers! The company must carry out more intelligent research.” Father Gino Tomaselli, Cabernardi’s parish priest, issued a quiet demurrer. “I am convinced,” he told his parishioners, “that Montecatini has carried out all possible research. Unfortunately, very little of the mineral is left.”

The Communist-led miners’ union appealed for a new investigation. When a government expert sent down to examine the mine turned out to be the same expert the company had hired, the union refused to listen to him. Half an hour later, 200 miners just reaching the end of the second shift in the mine below refused to come to the surface. Communist Santorelli raced to join them. “We will not come up,” he shouted, as the shaft elevator descended, “until the company revokes the firings.”

Day after day Gino and his companions stayed down in the damp, hot (104°) shaft, 1,600 feet below the green vineyards of Cabernardi. They bedded down in mule stalls, took walks along dark tunnels lit only by their battery-fed cap lamps, and relaxed with Communist papers sent down from the shaft head. On the surface, their families camped forlornly near -barbed-wire enclosures redolent with the rotten-egg smell of sulphur furnaces. A constant stream of baskets containing fish, cheese, soup and meat passed through the gate to be sent below. With the baskets went an occasional note. “If you don’t come up, I’ll go away forever,” wrote one wife. Her husband scrambled out of the emergency exit. By the end of the 30th day, 28 others had followed the same route.

The Stale Shaft. As Communist labor leaders throughout Italy tried to whip the miners’ cause into a general strike, other villagers in Cabernardi became disillusioned. “The workers,” declared one Demo-Christian union official, “are not staying down of their own free will. It is a result of Communist pressure, making a political issue of an economic problem.” Last week, as an old miner scrawled the number 34 on the calendar at the shaft head, the company ordered two of the four pumps feeding air into the mine cut off. Wine, liquor and cigarettes were removed from the food baskets going down to the strikers. As the air below grew staler, officials from three unions were deep in consultation with the mineowners up above. The unions agreed to accept the government expert’s word. The company agreed to suspend all dismissals for a month, to grant severance pay of 200,000 lire ($320) to anyone quitting voluntarily, and to give six days’ holiday pay to all the strikers. At week’s end, after 40 days in the darkness 171 squinting miners climbed out at the shaft head. “It turned out better than we expected,” said one.

Next day the entire village went to the church to pray that St. Barbara might find them some more sulphur.