On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Luciano Bianciardi, the cultural center Le Clarisse and the Luciano Bianciardi Foundation dedicate a photographic exhibition to the writer from Grosseto in two sections: The last mines of Maremma and Monte Amiata (1990-1991) by Carlo Bonazza and Cave and mines (1948-1953) of the Fratelli Gori Photographic Archive.

The exhibition itinerary therefore presents two fundamental moments in the history of mining in Maremma: the productive and economic decline of the second post-war period - made emblematic by the tragedy of the outbreak of the Ribolla mine in 1954 - and the definitive closure of the mining activities that, thirty years ago, Carlo Bonazza documented with a "wandering in places not very accessible and now known to few, in search of what remained of buildings, wells, castles, ovens, transport and collection systems, clearings and cuts in the rock, artificial lakes by now solidified ".

The mining Maremma of the nineties, before the establishment of the mining parks, was a place in ruins and abandoned by that human presence that in the fifties - through the representation of fatigue and work - was instead celebrated as the protagonist of the scene. And just some texts of 1956, freely taken from the social investigation essay I minatori della Maremma written by Luciano Bianciardi and Carlo Cassola, accompany the photographs on display. An artistic and emotional journey, the one evoked by the black and white photographs, which confronts the dry and documentary language of the two writers.

Today, the mines described by Bianciardi and Cassola, which housed and fed peasants who became workers and immigrants in search of work, no longer exist. And the picturesque ruins of the nineties, in many cases, have been transformed into attractions for tourist consumption whose pervasiveness, already in the sixties, had been precociously understood and predicted by the author of the Vita agra.