historical place of extraction of a compact stone called white tuff or gentle stone: from here for centuries calcarenite has been extracted.
Onorina Pozio, grandmother of the current owner, had inherited this quarry, the Conti quarry, from her father Edoardo, a member of one of the most important families in Cisternino. Even after her marriage to the lawyer Francesco Conti, from Locorotondo, the quarry was left in concession to local masters.
Their son, Giulio Cesare Conti, commander of the San Marco Battalion, highly decorated war hero, leader of the special corps Paratrooper Swimmers, in the early 1950s had become the protagonist of an action that had brought him to the international limelight: when the Iran had nationalized the oil and England was trying to prevent its export, Conti had managed to force the blockade by taking the ships loaded with black gold out of the Persian Gulf. With the reward received from the Iranian government, he bought new machines to modernize the quarry and decided to run it on his own, thus giving it new impetus and identifying among other things a small vein of onyx. With the same decisive style that had characterized his entire life, the Commander put his hand to the field and made it a small squad that churned out stone paving, curbs for pavements, materials and coatings for the villas, and dust with which he they also produced bricks in the Taranto area.
After his sudden death, his son Francesco Conti, a lawyer like his grandfather, led the mining activity until the 2000s, when due to environmental and town planning constraints the quarry was declared no longer usable. Many of the suggestive streets of the Sassi di Matera have been paved with this beautiful stone whose milky white color quickly tends to suggestive browning.
Translated by Google •
In the know? Log-in to add a tip for other adventurers!