IL POZZO VITTORIO EMANUELE II A MONTEPONI (IGLESIAS). L’ARCHITETTURA DELL’INGEGNERIA NELL' EPOPEA MINERARIA DELL’800.

To service the Monteponi mine, which is just a few kilometers away from Iglesias, the construction of the Vittorio Emanuele II shaft was started in 1863. This is one of the most significant structures of the industrial scale development of the mining activity, which from the second half of the Nineteenth century definitely modified the Sulcis-Iglesiente landscape. This structure preserves within an autarchic masonry box a modern system of machinery and metal cages connecting the "city" of the soil with that of the subsoil. The project is signed by the Belgian Charles Marcellis, an eclectic writer, entrepreneur, who represents an usual figure in the Monteponi-Iglesias compendium, where great technologists trained in the best European schools alternated to pursue the highest technological level possible in the development of the mining company. In this framework architecture appears as a solid protective shell, built with local materials and mostly traditional forms, which refer conventionally to those historicist canons that have gained mostly in the midst of the processes of the first Anglo-Saxon industrial revolution.