Yolo+ adopts Salgemma Lungro Festival

YOLO+ is an integrated communications agency based in Benevento that bases its operations on three cardinal principles: strategy - ideas - action.

Yolo+, within the 2024 call for proposals, chose to adopt Salgemma Lungro Festival, initiative that valorises the uniqueness of the Calabrian territory identified in the presence of the Lungro Salt Mine. The Festival reignited the social, economic and political debate on the Lungro Salt Mine, 45 years after its closure in 1978.

For millennia, the mine represented a great source of wealth of the entire Sibari plain. Salt was exported throughout Italy and Europe. Pliny the Elder, in his work Naturalis Historia (77-78 A.D.), first mentioned the existence of the mine. Despite this, finds have repeatedly been unearthed that would place the first era of use of the mine in prehistoric times. The Sybarites and Romans intensified the extraction and trade of rock salt. After them, the Normans used the salt from Lungro and started the ‘Salt Roads’ that climbed the paths of the Pollino National Park up to the Orsomarso mountains.

According to the Italian poet and patriot Vincenzo Padula, ‘the first mine gallery is a model of Greek architecture and was therefore known under the Greeks’. In 1835, after a visit to the mine, the geologist Leopoldo Pilla considered the Lungro deposit to be one of the largest in the world.

There were about 2000 steps that the miners walked down into the mine every day. In 1882, salt production reached 73,000 quintals per year, the mine employed 400 workers and 30 workers for the ancillary industries. From 1968, the slow decline began, the workers remained 69, no technological renovation was planned for the Lungro mine. On 5 August 1976, the State Monopolies decided to renounce the mining concession, the ratification by the Ministry of Industry took place on 8 March 1978, on that precise day, the glorious, thousand-year history of the Lungro salt mine, the only state-owned company that had existed in the Calabria region since the French occupation, came to an end. With the act of ratification, the property passed into municipal ownership and was soon looted and vandalised. 

Today, due to climate change and hydrogeological instability, the mine site is not accessible. The Salt Mine in Lungro is a site of archaeological, historical and architectural interest of national importance, one of the few examples in Italy of industrial archaeology that has been listed by the Regional Superintendency. The Pollino Park, thanks to the precious riches and beauty it jealously guards, is today considered the largest protected area in Italy, covering 192,565.00 hectares of land and straddling two regions, Basilicata and Calabria. Yolo+ will support the redefinition of communication on the festival website and social channels.