A documentary made by FAI, the Italian Environment Fund, which for over twenty minutes enchants the gaze and thought with its story and unpublished vintage images, a story that tells of suffering and redemption, of poverty and nobility of spirit, sickness and hope. We are in the premises of the workshop, where once the spare parts of the machinery of the Conti Vecchi salt pan were built and repaired. In those days you couldn't wait for them to come and go from the Continent and so everything was done at home. Now the workshop has returned to being as it is, like the photos taken in the years between the two world wars, as well as the archive, the director's office, all rebuilt in a few months, where it was and how it was. FAI architects and historians have taken care of every detail. The period ceramic tiles, which have survived only in the office that once belonged to the director of the salt pan, have been copied and had them made, as have the antique furnishings, armchairs and furnishings… what was there has been salvaged, restored and valued, what was lost was remade. The glance is remarkable, like living a flashback.
You immerse yourself in this fascinating story leaving the city of Cagliari, a few tens of kilometers going towards Pula. The Conti Vecchi saline is in the middle of a narrow road, water and flamingos on the right and water and flamingos on the left, which has the same arrival point, Cagliari. Even Google Maps loses its bearings, unable to give the right directions to get to this corner of paradise, where for a long time the sun, the sea and the wind have set the pace for working days and time for the passing of the seasons.
Sun sea wind are the three ingredients of salt, a commodity so precious as to be considered "white gold" and be the origin of many important words. «Indispensable first to preserve food, then also to give it flavour, for millennia it has been considered a symbol of longevity and truth. So important - says the narrative voice of the FAI documentary film - that from "salt" derive "salve", "health", "healthiness". Homer called it "divine", in the classical age it was worth so much that it was used instead of money to pay Roman soldiers: hence the word "salary"».
Sardinia has always been a land of salt marshes, but there is only a short step between stagnant water basins and endemic malaria. The intuition of Luigi Conti Vecchi, fresh from his leave and almost seventy years on his shoulders, is to transform an infested swamp into a place of well-being. In 1919 he presented the project, in 1925 the works were almost completed. A great engineering and social work, because the Conti Vecchi conceive the factory as a family, a community where people are born, study, have fun, get married, help each other. He builds houses for the workers and employees and two villas for the executives. A kindergarten and a school that all the children attend, a company bus that takes the older ones to the city to study, a church, the company shop, bowling tournaments. The dance parties, the football matches. Almost everything survived the Second World War, the bombs dropped by the Germans and then the misery of the long post-war period, the reckless industrialization, the subsequent crisis.
“This is a good example of two different galaxies. There is the industrial and environmental part that coexist. The story of Assemini for Eni - began the CEO of Eni, Claudio Descalzi, at the public opening ceremony of the Salt Pans on 26 May 2017 - is a fairly usual story: over 80% of the sites that we are reclaiming they do not arise from the Eni industrial cycle. In the 80s and 90s, until 95, all the sites that had a link with hydrocarbons, chemical or refining, of small or large companies that went bankrupt and did not take on the burden of remediation, passed to Eni . Even this site was not ours, we took it in 1982 - recalled Descalzi about the Conti Vecchi Salt Pans - and it is still one of the most advanced salt production plants in the Mediterranean, the second in Italy (after Santa Margherita di Savoia in Puglia), with its 2.700 hectares. An industry in full swing, a salt pan that produces edible salt and industrial salt for the production of soda, a museum-non-museum designed and managed by the FAI which is unique in its beauty.
From the Eniday site.
