PASQUA_sia
Pasquasia was once the most important mixed alkaline salt mine in Sicily, employing some 500 people across Enna and Caltanissetta. On the morning of 27 July 1992, the miners found the gates closed — shut forever. It had taken fifty years to build one of the world's most important mines, a single day to stop everything. The reasons remain contested: judge Paolo Borsellino was reportedly told, before his murder, that toxic and nuclear material was stored in the mine's wells; others point to a lack of political will to convert the site to magnesium production. “Pasquasia was, for me,” Stompo writes, “a feeling of sudden silence, a kind of journey to hell.” It is today a place of abandonment, yet it keeps extracting — no longer salt, but history: the fear of those who feared radioactive waste lay hidden in its wells. Stompo has returned since 2012, photographing rusted pitheads, a miner's helmet coated in dust, the elderly men who once worked underground.
