Fodor's Expert Review Floristella Mine

Central Sicily is peppered with sulfur mines, most abandoned since the 1980s, and testaments to one of the most horrific aspects of Sicily’s history. Many children ended up working in the mines, most of them orphans, and if they died at work, no time was wasted in burying them. Conditions for men were hardly better—they worked naked underground in 98°F temperatures, and thousands died of respiratory diseases. The Floristella Mine near the town of Valguarnera Caropepe is overlooked by a splendid villa, built, with chilling insensitivity, as a summer residence by the mine’s noble owners, and later used as offices. A path leads down to the minehead where a winching mechanism lowered the lift to nine different levels, giving access to tunnels that stretched for over 3 miles. The small ovens where the extracted rock was heated for a week until liquid sulfur emerged are still evident, as are the tracks along which small trains hauled the rock to the surface.

The best way to explore the haunting history of Valguarnera is with local guide Paolo Bellone, who has interviewed many of the miners and their families. He will meet you at the mine, then take you to see the town’s powerful and moving private museum collections, which include documentary footage of the sulfur miners at work in the 1960s and rooms furnished to demonstrate everyday living conditions for the poor and the better-off in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Tours culminate with a visit to the Casa Museo, where one woman lived for her entire life, from her birth in 1911 until her death at the age of 89 in 2000, rarely throwing anything away, including her father’s Fascist party membership card and a 1922 water bill. The house has been kept as it was found, down to the garlic, herbs, and sugar in the ancient kitchen, cigarette butts in an ashtray, and a packet of American Black Jack chewing gum.