Word: cabernardi
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...years the swarthy men of Cabernardi, their fathers and their grandfathers before them have dug sulphur out of the vine-covered hills around their village. The black-streaked yellow ore has brought them steady jobs, tidy red brick houses and a measure of happiness, but in recent years it has brought a creeping fear: What if the supply of sulphur should run out? As the mine shaft plunged deeper and deeper into the earth, even Cabernardi's Communists went regularly to the little parish church to pray to St. Barbara that the seam might last forever...
...Second Shift. Two months ago the Montecatini Co., which runs the mine, put a notice on its bulletin board. "Meticulous research," it read, "has established that the mine, in effect, is exhausted." Some 860 of Cabernardi's 1,000 miners would have to be laid off permanently. "Unjust," cried Communist Miner Gino Santorelli. "Capitalistic maneuvers! The company must carry out more intelligent research." Father Gino Tomaselli, Cabernardi's parish priest, issued a quiet demurrer. "I am convinced," he told his parishioners, "that Montecatini has carried out all possible research. Unfortunately, very little of the mineral is left...
...after day Gino and his companions stayed down in the damp, hot (104°) shaft, 1,600 feet below the green vineyards of Cabernardi. They bedded down in mule stalls, took walks along dark tunnels lit only by their battery-fed cap lamps, and relaxed with Communist papers sent down from the shaft head. On the surface, their families camped forlornly near -barbed-wire enclosures redolent with the rotten-egg smell of sulphur furnaces. A constant stream of baskets containing fish, cheese, soup and meat passed through the gate to be sent below. With the baskets went an occasional note...
...Stale Shaft. As Communist labor leaders throughout Italy tried to whip the miners' cause into a general strike, other villagers in Cabernardi became disillusioned. "The workers," declared one Demo-Christian union official, "are not staying down of their own free will. It is a result of Communist pressure, making a political issue of an economic problem." Last week, as an old miner scrawled the number 34 on the calendar at the shaft head, the company ordered two of the four pumps feeding air into the mine cut off. Wine, liquor and cigarettes were removed from the food baskets going...
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