Miniera Torgola

There are places you visit, and places that somehow tell you something.

On 17 May the alarm went off just after six. Hot shower, quick check of the backpack, aftershave, shoes, out. Noah was already waiting for me.

Months earlier he had told me about a place worth exploring. After months of trying to make our schedules meet, we were finally on the motorway, heading for Brescia. A little under two hours and the road starts to narrow and climb, the thick woods of Val Trompia seeming to close in on us.

Then, around a bend, this red colossus of steel and concrete appears. La Torgola. The unlikely place that drew rich investors from across the ocean, the quarry that fed hundreds of families for centuries, today a ruin, bound to give way under its own weight.

We park, handbrake, camera, torches. “Shall we?” “Let’s go.”

We thought it would be an exploration like any other. We were wrong. As soon as we are in, hidden by the thick vegetation, we see a black arch cut into the rock. “Shall we go in?” “Let’s go in.”

The torches light up wooden beams swollen with damp, bent under the weight of a mountain that for decades has gone on quietly pressing down on them. “The mountain has held so far. Let’s make sure it wasn’t waiting for us to collapse.” We come out.

Rust, dust, broken glass. Enormous machines motionless for years. Branches coming in through the windows and climbing over the structures, as if the wood had simply waited for people to leave before starting to take everything back.

An old conveyor belt crosses the plant. Except that instead of coming out of the mountain… it goes in.

We follow it.

The passage gets so low that we have to kneel and crawl through the mud. After a few metres the ceiling finally opens above our heads. And when we manage to stand up we understand where we have ended up. Dark. The real kind. The kind where switching off a torch means no longer being able to see even your own hands.

We go down further.

5, 10, 15, 20 metres. The air turns colder. The damp gets into your clothes. Old chains hang from the ceiling, as though they were man-made stalactites. We enter yet another tunnel, which opens out again shortly after.

At our feet, fifteen centimetres of water, completely still. Submerged and rusted, we make out two rails. In front of us, instead, the floor simply is not there any more. The tracks are left hanging in the dark.

We do not know how deep what is below us goes. “If it’s flooded at least we can’t fall into nothing.” “What a relief.”

We cross.

One foot on one rail. The other on the other. Then, in the silence of the mountain, we hear something. A voice. We stop.

“Did you hear it too?”

Before we can work out where it comes from, a small square of light appears at the end of the tunnel, and at its centre a small shadow raises an arm. An old fisherman. “Hello there!”

I don’t think a more absurd way of meeting could exist. We tell him why we are there. I tell him I’m a photographer, that we came to try and tell the story of what is left of the mine.

He looks at those structures with different eyes. For us they are a discovery. For him they are memory.

“My father worked here. My uncle worked here. I come here to fish so I can remember them.”

And suddenly all that rust changes meaning.

Because for centuries what came out of the Torgola was not silver, lead, zinc and fluorite. What came out were the wages that put bread on the table for hundreds of families.

Behind every worn step there were boots that had climbed it hundreds of times. Behind every rusted machine there were hands. And behind those tunnels we had just walked through, there were men who went into the mountain at dawn and came out after sunset, denying themselves daylight to keep their families going.

In 1999 the Torgola closed.

The machines stopped. The tunnels stayed empty. The wood slowly began to return.

Twenty-seven years later, we went in thinking we would photograph an abandoned mine. We came out with a story. The understanding that a place does not stop living when people leave. It goes on in what they left behind.

In the telling. In the children. In the grandchildren.

And sometimes even in an old fisherman met by chance on the other side of a mountain.

📍 Miniera Torgola, Collio, Val Trompia 📷 17 May 2026