Скачать или смотреть Rio Marina, Rio, Elba, Livorno, Tuscany, Italy, Europe

The Rio Marina area, like that of Capoliveri, has always been heavily exploited since the Etruscan times, until the mines closed in 1981, for mining purposes, due to the strong presence of pyrite, hematite and, to a lesser extent, of limonite in the ground. Unlike in the mines of Capoliveri, in the area surrounding Rio Marina the mines are in the open air. In the Etruscan period the minerals after being extracted were melted on the spot, making columns of smoke visible from the coast (just for this reason the Latins called this island "ilva", which means "smoky"); the minerals were also transported by sea to nearby Populonia and then melted in the furnaces. With the birth of the largest and best protected Port of Piombino all the minerals extracted in Rio Marina and Capoliveri were embarked, through special piers, on the commercial ships that brought them to Piombino; ​​the intense commercial traffic of minerals between R I Marina, Capoliveri and the coast, gave birth to numerous steel mills in Piombino, making the city of Piombino the main steel pole in Tuscany and one of the main ones in Italy. A short distance from the town, in the locality of Il Piano, there is the important rupestrian necropolis of Rio Marina, a collective burial dating back to the Aeneolithic period. The first documented settlements date back to around the 15th century: in that period the area was known as "Piaggia di Rio", and was the access point to the sea of ​​the nearby inhabited center of Rio nell'Elba. In those periods, in fact, pirate raids pushed the inhabitants to build the villages on the hills: the only buildings present at the time were the Rio Marina Tower (it appears as a "Beach Tower" in a cartography of 1420 attributed to Cristoforo Buondelmonti) , the oratory of San Rocco and some service buildings. It is in the eighteenth century, when the pirate raids are a reminder, that the village began to develop: some owners of ships and sailors, Ligurians and Corsicans, moved to the Marina di Rio and together with the guards, the weighers, some fishermen and to other masters and sailors who came down from Rio nell'Elba, they gave rise to the first community of Piaggio. At the time of the French invasion of 1799 the country has about 800 inhabitants. The industrial exploitation of iron mines began in that period: new technologies were imported and new quarries opened. In 1841, despite strong opposition from the parish of Rio nell'Elba, a bishop's decree sanctioned the birth of the village parish, which will find its seat in the church of Santa Barbara. It is dedicated to this Saint because Rio Marina has been a mining town since ancient times, which for this reason chose it as a protector. It was not built immediately in the place where it is located in the twenty-first century, at the entrance of the town, but in its center, where the Town Hall square is located, in the year 1843. That structure was short-lived, since since 1850 static problems that suggested in 1860 to abandon and demolish it. Only the bell tower remained, until 1958. But the population demanded a parish church suitable for the population increase, to be named after Santa Barbara, being the small existing oratory of San Rocco not large enough for a population that had grown exponentially together with the development of mining activities; and then the Ilva company, which had built the arches to transport the ore to the passageway of the old church, subsidized the construction of the new structure on its own land, and which was solemnly opened for worship on December 4, 1934 by the bishop of Massa and Populonia Faustino Baldini, and by the parish priest Andrea Corsetti. The construction and decoration of the wooden doors in tiles took place by Giuseppe («Tonietto») Carletti, former mayor of the town for two years after the end of the First World War, who in bas-relief wanted to represent the patron saint, in a haughty attitude, immersed in the environment of which she was the salvific referent. On April 13, 2003 it was inaugurated again after an important conservative restoration. In 1853 a small Waldensian community settled in the village, active until today, in fact there is the "Waldensian House", which hosts tourists in the summer with a Church in front of it where Valdism professes itself. With the push of the mines, the country saw strong population growth, reaching its peak at the end of the 19th century, when it owned one of the best fleets on the peninsula and was headed by economically strong and politically determined men. The division into an autonomous municipality dates from this period: to celebrate the occasion, a turret with a clock is built on the top of the now unused octagonal tower, giving the monument its current appearance. At the turn of the 1900s, the country experienced a deep crisis, which would end when the Elba company obtained possession of the entire production chain of the Rio mines, from extraction to transport.