Barely a year after the end of the Second World War, a political
agreement between Belgium and Italy brings more than 60,000
Italians to Belgian territory to work in the coal mines.
“Italo-Belgian Protocol”, 1946: manpower for one nation, mining
supplies for the other.
Urbano Ciacci arrives in Belgium in 1954, begins to live in the
town of Charleroi, south of Brussels. At the age of 21 he is one of
the many Italian emigrants who work in the Bois du Cazier mine
in Marcinelle.
On July 28, 1956 Urbano returned to Italy for a short time. He
wants to get married. He returns to his family and to his
hometown, Cartoceto, in the Marche region, to celebrate a
promise of love.
"[...] They are all dead. These three words stand out on the first
page of the Charleroi newspapers that came out early in the
morning in an extraordinary edition, listed in mourning. They are
all dead. The three words that people repeat in the streets in
consternation sounded like three funereal tolls on the last act of
Marcinelle's tragedy, at dawn on the seventeenth day of its
inception»
Corriere della Sera, 24 August 1956
So recited many newspapers the day after 8 August 1956, the day
in which the Marcinelle mine becomes the scene of a disaster that
causes the death of 262 people, including 136 Italian immigrants.
So says that page of the Corriere della Sera that Urbano read
through in Milan, on the carriage of the train returning to
Belgium. Many of his companions died in the accident.
Urbano today is the last, among the Italian miners of the
Marcinelle mine, still alive.
After the accident, the Italian State questioned the treaty, a
controversial agreement whose evaluation, years later and in the
light of the accident, becomes an opportunity to question the
history and events which, for better or for worse , made Europe.
Immigrant workers were only allowed to change jobs after 5
years in the mine, as stipulated in the protocol. Urbano retires
from his job only in 1981, when he retires.
The photographs observe and reconstruct small fragments of a
personal story. An individual story that preserves in memories,
experiences and inside preserved objects that of many other
Italians whose life was directed, from a moment on, by a political
agreement between nations.
Urbano is a life saved by a promise of love and a fortuitous
accident. It is also a life that bears witness to those of others,
broken in half, of which names, memories, memorials remain.
Even today Urbano remembers that «they are all dead» printed
on the front page of a newspaper. He still remembers well the
hope he felt in front of the entrance gate of the mine together with
his wife, that his companions would be rescued.
Even the landscape, like the eyes of a survivor today testifies and
tells. In the black ground and in the urban transformations, in the
industrial archaeologies, in the blackened facades of the houses.
The coal cities of Belgium are the Pays Noir.
Today, among the post-industrial urban agglomerations born
around the abandoned mines, artificial hills emerge in the
landscape, the Terrils - heaps of waste from the depths of the
excavations, dark monuments that mark the pointed memory of a
tragedy.
