Parco Archeominerario di San Silvestro

Behind Campiglia Marittima, the San Silvestro Archaeological Mining Park protects 450 hectares of woods, shafts and ruins where copper, lead, silver and zinc were mined from Etruscan times until the late 1970s. Its landscape preserves the history of mining and the excavated medieval village of Rocca San Silvestro.

Why it matters

Mining made this corner of the Val di Cornia an industrial landscape long before the word existed. Archaeologists have recorded the mouths of numerous ancient mine workings across the park, and Etruscan workings here included narrow, twisting shafts driven deep, apparently under the control of aristocratic families connected with Populonia, whose metal trade anchored the gulf. The park, opened in 1996, protects a record spanning Etruscan mining, medieval smelting settlements, Renaissance galleries and twentieth-century machinery. These remains place the history of extraction within the surrounding mountain landscape.

What to notice

The park's components include the Museum of Archaeology and Minerals, the Miniera del Temperino, the Lanzi-Temperino gallery, the processing works of Valle Lanzi, Villa Lanzi and the remains at Pozzo Earle. The Museum of Mining Machines and the former miners' canteen document the industrial history, while Rocca San Silvestro preserves the medieval settlement. Archaeological interpretation also documents reconstructed building techniques at the foot of the Rocca.

Context and history

The ore bodies here are sulphide deposits of copper, lead, silver, iron and zinc, formed roughly five million years ago; their surface outcrops drew the first miners in Etruscan times, and excavation of chamber tombs and settlement traces suggests the work was organised by lineage groups tied to Populonia. In the medieval period the Counts Della Gherardesca built the fortified village of Rocca San Silvestro for their miners and smelters, and metallurgy remained the valley's spine. An ambitious sixteenth-century revival followed, when Cosimo I de' Medici brought specialist miners from the Tyrol and Versilia; the immigrant Lanzi community built Case Caprareccia and Villa Lanzi before technical problems in separating the metals ended the venture around 1559. The nineteenth century brought explosives, pyrite treatment and multi-level galleries, and extraction continued until the mines closed in the late 1970s. Scientific excavation of the castle began in 1984 under the medieval archaeology faculty of the University of Siena, and the park project took shape from 1989 before opening in 1996.