THE STONE-CUTTERS OF BORGONE

by Ferzini Frans (1999) © L'Informatore del Marmista, Verona, Giorgio Zusi Editore, n. 446, pp. 16-20 [original title: Un'antica corporazione ora scomparsa: gli scalpellini di Borgone]

The Val di Susa once boasted a brotherhood whose traditions dated back to the 1700s. The patron of the stone workers was Saint Lucy.

Borgone, in the Val di Susa just 38 km from Turin, stands on the right bank of the River Dora, at the base of rocky crags and wooded slopes from which man has torn vineyards and stone quarries through immense hard work, unfortunately now submerged by brambles and abandon. Borgone was once one of the most important places in Piedmont as regards the "cultivation" and transformation of stone materials and undoubtedly the most important business centre in the Susa Valley.

In January 1906, here in Borgone, around 70 stone workers from the various quarries in the valley met to set up the "league of stone carvers" (the avalanche, 17/2/1906) gathering the different active quarries - Bussoleno, Vayes, Villafioccardo, Avigliana and Borgone - into a serf-help organisation. This helped bring about uniformity in rates of pay, improvements in working conditions and the creation of consumer co-operatives for the wholesale purchase of basic necessities and their retail marketing to the members.

Nevertheless, what happened in that January was not but the wider consequence of a pre-existing tradition that made Borgone and its villages a privileged zone. There already existed a guild dedicated to Saint Lucy of which today no trace remains except in the oral traditions of fewer and fewer people and a number of votary aedicules in stone whose bases are engraved in bas-relief with the corporate symbols of the craft: a mallet, two chisels, a compass with convex arms and a set-square. The mallet and the chisels, symbols of the first stage in the work process, are respectively the active and passive will enacted in the transformation of matter, the will of God made flesh and through His creation, the compass and the set-square, the tools of the "Great Architect" are the symbols of measure, justice and rectitude. The monument's small cusped tympanun bears the name of Saint Lucy and the year 1884 but oral tradition suggests that a brotherhood of workers had existed since at least 1700. It is known, besides, that the Saint was revered and invoked protect the eyes against shooting splinters of stone and diseases caused by dust, that the aedicule housed a statue of the Saint carved entirely in Borgone stone (now stolen) that was carried in procession by the stone cutters on the Saint's day on 13th December.

The first information related to the extraction and processing of quarry stone dates back to 1700 in the activity of a "Molera", a quarry producing and modelling millstones. The quarry was forced to stop production as early as 1800 following the market introduction of new types of materials for the manufacture pf these grindstones.

The impression of the "Molera" site is rather grandiose: a rocky wall, called the Forà Fortress by the locals, is formed by smooth slabs rising above the oak woods. In the centre of this rock face there is an apparently inaccessible quarry of truly impressive dimensions, entirely dug out by hand to extract the grindstones with picks, wedges and chisels.

The entrance, difficult to perceive, is by a series of steps carved with "subbia" chisels into the smooth rock face at an angle of 40-45°. The quarry appears in all its magnificence: the walls and the roof are entirely "embellished" by the parallel furrows of chisels creating casual decorations and orderly rationality: the grindstone disks can be seen everywhere, still united to the siliceous base rock ready to be detached using punches and wedges. The thin bed and the base is slightly angled to allow the workpieces to be transported on sledges.

From 1800, the quarries of Borgone focused their business on the extraction of cut stone, especially a gneiss with a porphyry-like structure quarried near the localities of Achit and Chiampano, characteristic hamlets close to Borgone.

The stone extracted at Achit has a very compact schito-granitoid structure with a whitish base colour spotted by small back particles costituted by various oxides. The hardness and the difficulty encountered in working this stone made it particularly ideal for the production of kerbstones for state roads, railway sleepers, cubes and small blocks for road paving, simple decorations and balconies of considerable size and thickness, bollards and bolsters.

Clients did not request installation only in the valley, but also often in Turin and Cuneo for road paving, porches, staircases, etc.

Of the stone extracted from the quarries in the Chiampano area, turned into a Ronchi concession in 1895, the material produced in Achit was held in high regard, being well suited for all kinds of processing and different kinds of cutting operation. Ash-grey in colour, it has major stratifications, making it possible to achieve so-called "fine" finishing with hammered or chiselled surfaces, as well as mouldings and similar installations. Examples are the door frames of the parish church of Borgone, the horizontal moulding of the staiway of the Church of the Gran Madre in Turin (1818), the fittings of the Alotto residence in Borgone (intended for a villa in Cuneo), the capitals of the facade of the Court of Appeal placed on the columns in Vayes stone.

Exceptional documentation is furnished there by a photo dating from 1935 or 1937 of the concession-owner Arnaud Ferdinando. The photo was taken alongside the railway station where finished products were stored ready for consignment. In the foreground is the upper part of a Gothic mullion intended for complete restoration work on the "Sacra di San Michele". It is known that the stone used was extracted in the Arnaud concession quarry engaged for stone restoration work.

Chiampano and Achit are now silent; Ferdinando Ambrosia, past seventy, is practically the only nativeborn person left in Achit: he feels that choosing to work the fields helped him avoid silicosis and remembers the tinkling of the mallets, the competition of the curb cutters paid so much per metre, the coming and going of carters, the immigration of the jailbirds from the island of Elba and the Sardinian quarrymen in the 1950s "... at that time, stone cutters died at 50, dust killed them all!". Only the vineyards now see the work of man.