Founded in 1938 beside the great Serbariu mine, Carbonia is the city of coal: built in two years by decree, with its lictorial tower and its monumental square, it is today one of the most interesting case studies in twentieth-century town planning. The opening was a regime ritual, with Mussolini speaking from the tower to thirty-five thousand people; but the man who had actually built it was Guido Segre, a leading figure of the Jewish community of Trieste and president of the Italian coal board, who raised two twin workers' towns: this one and Arsia, in Istria. A quarter of the first twelve thousand inhabitants came from the mainland, from the Veneto to Basilicata, and nine out of ten were men.
Coal was meant to turn the Sulcis into an Italian Ruhr; then the war put the pits under military rule and pushed the shifts to their limit, with many accidents. It was then, on the second of May 1942, that the miners downed tools against the cost of living: the first strike in Sardinia and one of the first in Italy under fascism, in a closely watched company town. Serbariu closed in 1964 and people left again; today the disused mine is the Coal Museum, and you go down into the tunnels with lamps, often guided by former miners. Above the city stands Monte Sirai, a Phoenician and Punic settlement rediscovered because a local boy picked up a fragment; and all around lies the Sulcis of granite beaches and islands: Sant'Antioco, joined by an isthmus, and Carloforte with its Tabarkin community.
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📅 Every year, on the Thursday after the second Sunday of May
Carbonia celebrates Saint Pontian on the Thursday after the second Sunday of May, in the church on Piazza Roma inaugurated together with the town itself in 1938; the name «Carbonia» literally means «land of coal», a testament to its origin as a Fascist-era mining town.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
