The scream echoes through the hall, "Gluckauf!" It does not have the same liberating and auspicious force that the miners expressed every time they left the mine - once again alive - at the end of their shift, but the participation is unanimous. As part of the cultural festival 'CamporossoRacconta', at the Vicinìa di Camporosso (Tarvisio, Udine) the screening of the docufilm "Avenal", by the director AnnaSandrini, on the community built around the mine of the Cave del Predil, and the testimonies of some protagonists, recalled the activity and the social repercussions of hard work in the mine.
"You fall in love with the mine", it is a place where a "mixture of races between Sicilians, Belluno, Calabrians, Slovenians and, of course, Friulians" takes place, a babel of languages and cultures where solidarity and trust are essential to be able to work while reducing the risk of accidents. This was told by four former Predil miners, now sprightly old men who arrived with elegant uniforms, white gloves and badges with the badges of Raibl (Cava del Predil in German). The testimonies were touching, even solemn, a trait that springs from respect for work, physical fatigue, and, indeed, for sharing, the community spirit that arises spontaneously from a particular and dangerous job such as that in the mines.
"The mine has its own smell and its own noise, which is that of the water flowing and the wagons running on the track," says one of them, who descended hundreds of meters underground for the first time when he was five years old. "I was struck by the smell; I felt it again, decades later when, shattering a small diaphragm of rock, I was hit by a gust of fresh rock scent." Another recites the "Miner's Poem", and together they all remember Cave, a proud self-sufficient community, hard work but good wages and exemption from war, today a small village a little out of the way near the border with Slovenia.
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