When they were digging pietra serena between Arno and Ombrone

The quarries of Gonfolina in Comeana

Poggio a Caiano, near the central market square there is a company that is perhaps one of the last ones of the area to work pietra serena (commonly called “Firenzuola stone”). In Comeana there are a couple more.   But no longer do they work the stone which was dug at Gonfolina of Comeana until half a century ago. In fact the days are gone when those quarries were active.   Today the stone, for the few survived companies, comes from other places (especially from Firenzuola) and the processing industry has had the upper hand.   Trying to stop the progress would be anachronistic and childish. But the words of Ruskin come to mind with which, in the nineteenth century, he denounced the “guilty silence in which, under the pressure of the industrial revolution, we are losing the sum of infinite information accumulated in the ancient crafts.” In fact, the work of the stonemason, especially on Montalbano, now belongs to the past. But it’s the fact of not talking about it, of not making a minimum tribute to the history of those men (in the end, almost an entire countryside), that is wrong. An item could also be used to relieve this pain.  The story of the stone cutters in fact deserves a museum. A museum (or part of it) could very well be devoted to copious straw plaiters that, that not such long time ago, worked the straw in Poggio a Caiano. To tell the truth someone had already thought of it. A few years ago, citizens and stone carvers of Comeana proposed to establish an open air museum in the old quarries of Gonfolina, where the ruins of huts still stand.
The municipal administration seemed interested. But then, given the difficulty to reconcile the numerous people who own and divide this this land (sometimes the owners were dead and the heirs were unknown), it all came to nothing. Only testimony and tangible tribute to those ancient stone masons and an act of resistance against general oblivion remains a bas-relief of Giuseppe Caselle, an appreciated local artist, who wanted to establish the Pro Loco of Carmignano at the beginning of Via Vittorio Veneto in Comeana, encased in a niche just down the road leading to the quarry. But the quarries can also be reached from Signa, along the banks of Arno or Ombrone. And when we see in the distance the rock of Gonfolina, perhaps it would be enough to close your eyes for a moment to imagine that characteristic rhythmic patter of mallets that, like the hum of an hard-working beehive, they once heard a couple of hundred meters away, while on the river (until also the trains hadn’t made their arrival in Carmignano) stone slabs that headed to Livorno glided in large barges. Climbing up towards the old ridges, we encounter the huts that served as a dressing room, dining hall and a place of work during rainy days, the closets where were stored: mallets, small mallets, punches, chisels and yardsticks (as well as rulers, square rulers and moulders, bush hammers, claws and hammers), and cobblestone makers and the service area that was for the kids to keep in order. Next to the huts the old figs, that workers had planted to escape the sun, have still survived. It would be enough to make just one last effort to imagine an old stonemason under one of them – sitting cross-legged on a box that also served as a tool bag concentrated on working a stone. (Wf)

TRAVELLING along the Florence-Pisa railway line, almost in front of Carmignano station on the opposite bank of the river we come across an imposing rock on the county road: it’s “the stone of fairies”, or more properly said “the stone of Gonfolina”. Over the centuries there have been several stories and legends told. Leonardo supposed that “in ancient times” that rock united with the southern foothills of Monte Albano, as to form in the plain of Florence-Prato and Pistoia, a huge lake. Then someone or something had cut it. There are those who tell with much fantasy (and also Villani reports this legend) that the author of the stone was Hannibal. But in his time (and certainly in the high period of the Etruscans) the Arno had already found its way to the mouth. A striking atmosphere of mystery still continues to surround that place. (Wf)

For flair and the skills of the many workers, artefacts from the caves of Comeana became renowned: first near-by, particularly in Florence, Prato and Montecatini (where they were much appreciated) and then even abroad – in Switzerland and in France – where some of them went to work having quite great success. Production increased despite the decline of workers – due to the crisis that followed the two world wars, and reached its highest point after the Second World War – with the increase of demand for stone for reconstruction works. In the fifties and sixties the decline was inevitable, up to closure, because the high demand for workers in the textile industry of Prato emptied quarries and countryside, and the discovery of “softer” stone that was easy to work with machines.
It’s definitely NOT a coincidence that the largest stone quarries of the Florentine area arise in the shadow of Artimino and Fiesole, the most important built-up Etruscan  areas (or at least among the most important) in the north of Etruria. A confirmation of how the excavation and processing in the quarries of Comeana, near the mouth of Ombrone creek in the river Arno, have very ancient origins is that there are many square stones found in all Etruscan tombs of the area. The ability to work and the art of their ancestors had already sublimed: just admire the closing door of the tomb of Montefortini, some parts of the tomb of Boschetti or Prato Rosello, ending with the burial of Grumulo situated right above the quarry. The signs of a chisel are clear. The real work of quarrying began, however, to be important for the economy of the area only from the mid-eighteenth century, although the historian Targioni Tozzetti in his reports from 1741, cites a document even from 1269 in which quarries called “the Gonfolina” are already quoted and the historian Repetti mentions another from 9 May 1124.The stone which was dug there was very “SIMILAR for grain, colour and use to that of Fiesole,” informs us Repetti in the nineteenth century. In 1790, according to the municipal and diocesan archives, already 60 people were working in the quarries, in 1812, as states the parish family book of the place, the number of workers had risen to 90. The work was very hard and the techniques they used still primitive. Because of the steepness of the mountain, they worked mostly in the open air. They dug in a lower part, describes Targioni-Tozzetti, and then setting fire to the wooden props they made collapse the entire ridge. Despite the working conditions – unthinkable today – the demand for carved stone increased and in 1881 there were 11 sandstone quarries in operation near the river Arno, with about 140 employees with the population of 1427 inhabitants in Comeana. In 1901 the population had risen to 1724 and the number of workers to 164.The payroll reached an average of 1.80 liras per day and only after a long series of strikes which ended in 1906 payroll was count on an hourly basis. In 1911, tells the carmignanese Joseph Rigoli in an interesting booklet of historical statistic notes published in 1914, active quarries achieved the number of 33. If we add the 30 quarries of Lastra a Signa, located right on the other side of Arno opposite those of Carmignano, you have a total of more than sixty: a clear sign of how this material was sought-after. There were around 300 adult workers and 50 kids under the age of fifteen: a certainly impressive work force, for those years. Then, after the Second World War, began a slow inexorable decline. Even in the fifties in the station of Carmignano there were four active quarries, and in Gonfolina there were at least twenty with around a hundred employees. But they were mostly elderly people, lacking young replacements. Only six of these companies had launched the excavation with jackhammers and just four owned a truck to transport the material, while the processing was still carried out manually. By then young people preferred more profitable jobs, and even those few who were said to have the dust in the blood, preferred to find work in the shops of marble workers.
The work in quarries lasted from eight to ten hours a day and masons were divided into categories or classes – each with a different salary. It ranged from “very high class,” to which belonged specialists, “fine tune” workers that in 1914, as Rigoli writes, earned 45 to 55 cents an hour (in 1906 when wages had become hourly it was around 30 cents), first class – foremen and skilled stonemasons, paid between 40 and 45 cents. To the second class belonged the stonemasons, quarry-men and the engravers of secondary importance, they earned 35 to 37 cents (28 in 1906).Then there were the quarry-men and stone cutters of advanced age (older workers were paid less) that earned 28 to 34 cents per hour (26 in 1906) and ending with “hinnies”, that depending on their abilities were paid 18 to 28 cents. The last ones were more or less manual labourers and mostly boys –   even in the quarries child labour was widespread. Accidents certainly weren’t rare. But another great enemy of stonemasons was the silicosis. That fine powder which deposited into their lungs was not unknown, but there were very few methods to fight it. Targioni-Tozzetti writes at the end of the eighteenth century: “When the masons need to split the rocks with force of punches and wedges, they always pour water into the slot where they force the wedges, because otherwise a particular fine powder would fly high that would damage their lungs … “.

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