White Gold

• Prize
  Silver in Editorial/Environmental
• Photographer
  Simone Tramonte

The mine Racalmuto in Sicily, it’s one more rich deposits of salt in Europe: a huge lens of rock salt contained in the heart of a mountain. Here it continues to resist the mining culture of Sicily through which a territory marked by a very high unemployment rate are still working and support dozens of families of miners. Going down in the mine, leaving behind the light, to enter into the bowels of the earth, where the work of man has created miles of tunnels, which penetrate the mountain for hundreds of meters below the surface. The mine is like a womb, it is the 'beginning', it’s here that there was the sea millions of years ago, when there was still no trace of man. It's a lunar landscape, where the lights of machinery, completely covered by a white powder, seem eyes of unknown creatures. It is thanks to the courage, passion and professionalism of these men that at every moment the rebirth of a particle of the universe is accomplished.