What really struck me when I first began to study documents and to investigate the subject was that, wherever I went, wherever I looked, in web sites, papers or books on Sciacca and its coral, written by the Saccensi – as the people of Sciacca like to be called – I could find nothing. If you look on the Internet... nothing. If you go to Sciacca, apart from five or six shops that sell a bit of coral they say is from Sciacca, there’s really not much else.
Memory completely wiped out. Why?
Then I understood.
If we consider Torre del Greco, the Torresi fishermen have been going coral fishing since the 1500s, maybe even before that. Three hundred years later, in 1805, the fortunate insight of the Bourbons encouraged the people of Torre to also begin to craft the coral and, of course, to then sell it. Those who talk about a complete supply chain should know that the so highly disparaged Bourbons implemented a complete and successful supply chain over 200 years ago!
When Alberto Maniscalco discovered the first coral bank off the coast of Sciacca, everybody rushed there. Then they found a second... and a third.
Those fifteen years from 1875 to 1890 were only an episode in the history of Torre del Greco. But for Sciacca it was an epic, its entire history of coral. Not even a good one in the end, nor pleasant to remember, as there were more losers than winners.
The opposite was true for Torre del Greco, as on the plus/minus scale Torre could also count on revenue from the crafting of the coral.
In addition, once they finished fishing on the banks of Sciacca, as far as the Sciacchitani were concerned those unsold cases of coral massed in the depots and depreciated in value became a useless and expensive burden.
Not so in Torre del Greco, where everyone fearlessly held on to (and still holds on to) the coral, knowing that sooner or later they would craft it. And so it was.
And so it still is today. Although there is one additional aspect. It was during those years that the shops of Torre became factories, special skills were developed, production lines and industrial processes created.
In the early nineteen hundreds Torre already had companies (I use this term specifically) that employed hundreds of workers, with just as many doing piece work at home. It was during those years that Torre del Greco truly developed, to become first in its field, acquiring a worldwide monopoly on coral craftsmanship that still holds true today.
But we mustn’t forget that the merit for all this belongs to the coral harvested in Sciacca.
To be Continued....
[text taken with license of the author Giuseppe Rajola from the book Sciacca Mystery]
Enjoy!
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