K: “It’s hard, it’s stone, but on the first day I felt nothing”.

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The quarry is an open-air environment, its rock walls carved into fifteen-meter-high stepped terraces. The resource is the true essence of the landscape—elusive in its constant transformation, hazardous and unhealthy in its professional processing. Work takes place under the sun, amid the dust stirred up by shovels and trucks; in the mud, when it rains. Conditions are harsh. Internal roads connect the yard designated for the movement of machinery, bodies, and rocks. The extraction of the lots begins from the top, removing soil and vegetation to proceed with excavation activities at lower levels, down to sunken areas. As it is transformed, the mountain is brought down either by explosive charges placed at the base of the terraces or by dismantling the most unstable layers with excavators. The collapsed wall is collected by mechanical shovels, relocated to the workers’ stations, or loaded onto trucks. The second phase consists of sorting the material, separating waste, and splitting the blocks, a task performed by labourers using a two-faced sledgehammer—one side flat, the other pointed. The extracted slabs are then sent to secondary processing, no longer manually but with machines, either at the quarry or externally. Operators of hydraulic presses break the pieces into various sizes with rapid, repetitive gestures. The waste from processing, once piled into massive landfills descending from the quarries, is now crushed and sold. The cycle ends with the placement of the finished products, primarily used for paving streets and urban spaces, both public and private. One of the main compositional techniques is the porphyry mosaic—known as opus incertum (‘irregular work’). The installer uses irregularly shaped and coloured slabs. The design is not prearranged but progresses as it takes form. The edges of each slab dictate how the others will fit together.

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K: “When I came here, I didn’t speak Italian. I used to live near Ascoli Piceno. I worked in a barn—twenty hours a day with one meal. I had to milk a hundred cows, clean up the manure, and feed a hundred and fifty. After two years, I threatened them with a pitchfork just to make them understand. That wasn’t a life. Then I came here”.

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The so-called quadrilatero del porfido (‘porphyry district’) is one of the most important deposits of natural paving stones. Over seventy quarries are active within ten square kilometres, alongside hundreds of companies [1]. Extraction activities are concentrated in four municipalities in the province of Trento—Albiano, Lona Lases, Fornace, and Baselga di Piné—which own the sites and regulate public concessions and royalties. Though fragmented, the industrial organization controls the resource through lobbying practices, stabilizing costs across the supply chain. The entanglement of local administrations and industry is longstanding, with quarrying rights that have been dominated for more than sixty years by a select group of companies that have since expanded their business abroad. Booming in the latter half of the twentieth century, this extractive monoculture “turned stone into bread” [2], stemming the depopulation process in one of the Alps’ poorest areas, while facing significant environmental, social, and health consequences [3]. The crisis in the sector began in 2006. The collapse of the construction market in 2008 exacerbated its internal weaknesses, leading to fiercer competition. The downturn eroded long-standing certainties. Employment has steadily declined. Today, around 400 workers are estimated to be employed in the quarries, with several hundred more in related industries.

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> [FATIGUE]: A public good privately exploited
> Open file: Fieldwork Diary
> Search: fatigue
> Press Enter x 98.

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Trentino porphyry has two main qualities: exceptional hardness and a natural stratification that allows slabs to be manually extracted [4]. Cobblestones, kerbstones, small paving stones, and tiles can be obtained from this slabs [4]. The work requires the exertion of physical strength amplified by tools and machinery. In the splitting process, the perception of hardness meets the perception of fragility—where the latter must overcome the former.

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K: “It’s true... you have the machines. Why don’t you invent a labourer then? If a man can do it...”.

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After a work experience in a porphyry quarry—like many young people, seeking to earn quickly—Pietro opened a farm. He reflects on his previous occupation, likening it to the annihilation of a person. Describing the work of cutting cobblestones, his narrative turns technical, using sound and onomatopoeia to express his embodied memories. His voice shifts in tone, evoking repetitive noises and accelerating rhythms, seemingly etched on his memory. “It’s alienating, an alienation, alienating... Imagine making stone squares all day for seven, eight months a year, fifty, forty quintals a day: Tin tom pom, tin ton, tin ton ton... Or the labourers, splitting a block like this table: boom boom boom. Breaking it open, all by sheer weight, bim bum and bim”.

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“In the Sixties, everything was done by hand. Then, slowly, technology lightened the load a bit”, recalls an entrepreneur. “I spent ten years as a railway operator, but the stone called me back, and I returned to my roots. In the Eighties, the world’s most beautiful squares were paved with porphyry—it means the stone never betrays us, but we must not betray the stone. Because from this stone we got life, we got everything”.

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“When you were sixteen, you went there: they paid you as much as a teacher” recalls Pietro. “Many were driving without a license, seventeen-year-old boys who already had enough money for a car. And how do you convince someone to stay in school, to study? I was self-employed. I thought it was profitable, but it wasn’t as profitable or as safe as I thought: shards flying, physical fatigue, no one to talk to. By the time you’re fifty, if silicosis hasn’t killed you, you’re burnt out... you’ve lost yourself completely [5]”.

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“Go to the cemeteries”, Carolina, daughter of a worker born in 1926, tells me. “You’ll find two generations dead from silicosis. There were always younger arms to replace them, younger than my father, but they hit hard—that’s what mattered. They never made it to sixty. They’d come home in the evening and fall asleep at the table. You couldn’t talk about anything. Everything became difficult. So, what is silicosis?”. It is a family disease.

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Vigilio punctuates his speech by clapping his hand on the table. He was the mayor of Lona Lases from 1985 to 1995. Now retired, his father’s fate led him away from the quarries early on. “At fourteen, I became the head of the family. Before school, I would sell a backpack full of chestnuts, go to Trento in donated clothes, with a piece of cheese because we had a cow [...]. My father counted the blocks; now, everything is weighed in quintals. When he got sick, he spent three years in the hospital. They said it was tuberculosis. But he had coughed up blood three times. Then he said: ‘Don’t see me as your father. I have silicosis. When I die, have them cut me open.’ And it was the first autopsy in the industry”.

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Albiano, November 14, 2015. At the trade union conference La tutela degli infortuni e delle malattie professionali nel settore del porfido (‘The Protection of Workplace Accidents and Occupational Diseases in the Porphyry Sector’), a lawyer from Verona speaks [6]: “Looking at the data, either the issue of workplace injuries and diseases has been kept quiet out of fear of losing jobs, or it doesn’t exist. But I see that you are in the very exclusive category of extremely strenuous and permanently debilitating jobs [...]. I will not judge: certainly, more attention could be paid. But the fact that many general practitioners that were invited are not here makes me think that there is also an attempt to turn a blind eye by those who are supposed to report cases”.

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Carolina: “The mayor used to say: ‘You don’t eat with books; you eat with stones’. Now the question is: does the quarry still feed us?”.

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K: “They would stop you on the street to offer you a job. But it’s terrifying when you see what it entails. We didn’t know those mountains eat men. Have you seen them? They were made by hand, you know!”.

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> April 30, 1969: “The quarry is our altar—the motto and inscription, symbol of the hard and risky toil” [7].

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Working in the quarry entails economic and health risks exacerbated by piecework contracts. Beyond a certain output threshold, wages shift from union pay to a system tied to the excess quantity—inevitably increasing physical strain and fostering constant competition among workers and within themselves. Piecework works in an autopoietic way: the skill of the worker determines the quality of the material, and the quality of the material, in turn, determines the worker’s skill. The most sought-after labourers are called mountain breakers and, in the past, cobblestone cutters moved from quarry to quarry in search of better wages. The quality of the rock influences rhythms, risks, and earnings. Its allocation is governed by hierarchical relationships, with the owner and a trusted palista [T] at the top. The raw material thus becomes a mediator of social roles, power relations, and practices of inclusion or exclusion. Providing subpar porphyry often serves as a means of controlling dissent or punishing insubordination [8]. The consequences extend far beyond the workplace, impacting personal choices, friendships, allegiances, and the ability to express oneself.

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K: “We used to compete: who could make more, who could earn more. Maybe the loader made the difference—if one was his neighbour or his brother... He would unload the stone there. You had to deal with it. You break it... smash it, and woe betide you if you ruin it. If it weighs a quintal, who cares? You lift it. The site manager isn’t needed—they know I’ll kill myself without being pushed. The more you do, the worse it gets. You think: ‘Next year I’ll change’. What change? Life’s gone. Now I’m sixty. If I object, the answer is simple: ‘Leave’. And where do I go? Who would take me if I’m completely worn out?”.

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It feels like taking the wrong turn. Inverse shapes, from convex to concave, carve out the profile of a vast landscape that slowly gains detail. On one side, you see the chasms, while on the other, a small valley runs alongside an incision hundreds of meters high and a kilometre long. In the foreground, the roofs of the processing area emerge, along with yards and warehouses, where stones are gathered in piles, in crates, among rusted buckets—marking the uncertain boundary between public and private property. A loader operator explains the situation to me. These are tense days due to the ongoing dispute over the sector’s contract, which will replace the one that expired in 2014. “We don’t have drinkable water or restrooms, but at least we’re getting a good raise, and we can eat in the canteen. Over there, the artisans flourish! They have nothing, like dogs. With their gloves, their sneakers… smashing stones… no year-end bonus, no family allowances, fixed wages. They make them work by the hour, whenever they want: Saturdays, Sundays, day, night. Not even one is insured for more than two hours. No vacations, no leave. Artisans? The only thing they’re missing are chains. They’re just prisoners, that’s all”.

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K: “It’s hard, it’s stone, but on the first day I felt nothing. I worked on a three-meter by two-meter block. Couldn’t they have given me something lighter? But you have to learn: either eat this meal or go hungry. The second day, I sat down—I couldn’t get up, every muscle hurt. But little by little, we humans adapt. The trouble is, it’s wealth built on others’ backs. That’s the real issue. That’s what hurts”.

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*K. stands for Kamber, who is a former quarry worker. After being dismissed following a heart attack, Kamber was unable to find alternative employment in the porphyry sector. In 2009, along with other current and former workers, he founded the Comitato Dignità (‘Dignity Committee’) to support workers and fight discrimination, particularly against foreign labourers, who at the time were most affected by layoffs.