Miniere e cave non più attive in Lombardia: problema o risorsa?

Between the sixties and the eighties, several mines and quarries in Lombardy (northern Italy) stopped production, almost never for exhaustion of reserves, and often the mining activities were completely abandoned. Some of these ore and stone deposits were exploited since historical age, and they have had an important influence on the social and economic development of the major valleys of Lombardy. Well known is the supply of rocks used in local buildings and monuments, and of raw materials for the birth and the growth of metallurgic and manufacturing industries. On the other hand, the remnants of all these activities have left a great number of environmental impact factors, for example some surface collapses or landslides above and around the stopes, or as local pollution by toxic waste. But at the same time, the ancient mining technologies represent a very important heritage of industrial archaeology. Moreover, the great chance to have a clear underground sight of the rock bodies (like an “internal” 3D sight) represents for several mining sites a wonderful geological heritage. Just by recovering the technological mining heritage and studying the geological setting, we could choose some of these sites, with the aim of starting and testing recovering and improving initiatives, strictly related to their own peculiarity, and in respect of the locally well-established so called “mining landscape”.