It all begins with a voice heard almost by chance, on a podcast. A miner is singing in 1961, and the lyrics tell of an underground battle, literally, fought in the shafts of Montevecchio, one of the most important mines in twentieth-century Sardinia. That fragmentary recording was enough for Alessandro Fanari, director of the Sa Cadra e' Ucca di Marrubiu choir , to begin two years of research that would lead to the rediscovery of an extraordinary document: the song, or rather, the mutetus, composed by the Masili brothers of Guspini and delivered to the miners employed on the fourth level of the Telle shaft, in late March 1961 .
"We heard that voice on a podcast and immediately knew there was something important to find," Fanari says. "Our choir specializes in researching historical songs on social issues, and this was exactly the kind of memory that was at risk of being lost forever." The search lasted about two years, until the complete text of the song was found in the book "My Life in the Mines of Montevecchio" by Serafino Leo , a miner, communist trade unionist, and firsthand witness to the occupation. His memory is a crucial historical source for reconstructing the workers' struggles in the postwar Sardinian mines.
The historical context in which the mutetus arose was that of a long and consuming labor dispute. Since 1943, workers at the Montevecchio mine had been bound by a collective company agreement, the so-called "pattu aziendali," which imposed unfair conditions that the miners had rejected for years. The mine was headed by engineer Filippo Minghetti, an authoritarian figure whom the workers had nicknamed the Duce of Montevecchio.
" That song was a message of solidarity sung in the darkness of the shaft ," Fanari explains. "The voice of those outside, addressed to those resisting underground. The Masili brothers composed it and sent it directly to the occupiers. It is a human document even before it is a musical one." The occupation of Level IV lasted about two weeks, until Easter 1961. It ended with the miners' victory and the abolition of the much-hated "pattu," an outcome that marked a concrete turning point in the working conditions of hundreds of Sardinian families.
Today, that mutetus resonates again thanks to Sa Cadra e' Ucca, a choir that has always placed the voices of the most vulnerable, the marginalized, those whom official history tends to forget, at the center of its artistic research. This rediscovery is part of an increasingly urgent line of research concerning the intangible heritage linked to the world of Sardinian mining, a civilization that disappeared in the space of a few decades and of which increasingly faint traces remain. "Restoring this song to the community means acknowledging a struggle that was real, painful, and victorious," concludes Fanari. " Workers' memory is part of our cultural identity. Keeping it alive is both a political and artistic act ." That this is done by the storytellers of a small choir from Marrubiu, born in bars and raised in each other's homes, is profoundly human.