A tale about the Ice Miners from Celano, mostly boys who came together to provide a refrigeration service to Italy’s rich and nobility and that highlights the ever-decreasing snow line in Abruzzo through climate change.
They left the sickle to take up axes, saws, hammers and chisels.
They left the wheat and the hot plain and climbed to the high peaks of Mount Sirente.
Theirs was a temporary job, as we would say today part-time or for a very short time. It was the craft of Celano’s ice miners who were mostly boys. The boys left in the middle of the night with mules and donkeys. At four in the morning, they were right under the snow and glaciers of Sirente. One group would stop first in the crevasses and the frozen shaded areas. Some in the “Jaccio della Fonte del Favo”, others above “la Paura”, and others reached the snowfield of the summit.
At first light, they had already marked the first blocks to be cut in the most accessible places. Once the numerous holes of just a few centimetres had been drilled and some cuts made with an axe, the ice was broken, trying to get out a block not very large, but thick enough (about 50 kilos) to hoist it over the back of the donkey or the mule that would carry up to 2 quintals (200 kg). They would square it off and give it a finish with a carpenter’s saw. Having taken all the necessary ice, they covered it with the newly threshed straw with all its dust and straw that would be in sacks and loaded on top of the animals to return to the village.
Once they arrived, it was sold in bars, cellars, hospitals, and to wealthy ladies and the feasts of all the Holy Martyrs in August (the first slushes).
An elderly man told me that many from Celano did this job and together they formed a kind of company to buy donkeys together at the San Giuseppe fair in Pescina on May 1st. They were resold at the end of the summer.
Indeed, there are still living testimonies, which recall how in the case of more serious accidents, teams of boys immediately took their ice from Sirente to use it as an anti-inflammatory and to relieve pain.
Other journeys were made for Lazio and Puglia always on the back of a mule. Hundreds of kilometres, with the ice dripping, but at the end of the journey, 50% remained.
In the Montagna Grande si Celano (Sirente), completely exposed to the midday sun, there were few areas where the ice did not melt all year round. Some quarrymen who had this as their main job, had to turn to the municipality of Secinaro which had, given the request, to create a special budget chapter to sell the ice to traders and quarrymen of other countries, given that the Sirente snowfield of Secinaro, and which lasted for a year.
In even more ancient times, in the era of the Counts, this profession was popular, as the nobility did not mind expenses and had subjects they could use at no cost. They used the snow tanks inside the castle dwellings all year round, fed precisely from the ice cut in Sirente.
An example of these times is the ice house and snowfield of Goriano Sicoli, sitting on the ancient drover track, the Regio Tratturo Celano Foggia which is still visible in its ancient structure. The construction, with mortar and stones, and with its underground ventilation openings, housed the ice of huge caravans of mules, which deposited it there, and was then subsequently reloaded and transported across the ancient tratturo (transumanza tracks) to other regions in Southern Italy as far as Bari, and from there, some blocks reached foreign lands by sea.”
Story by Giuseppe Di Fabio, I Briganti Della Majella – Fan Club ( storia, cultura e tradizioni)
