Museo della Miniera di Calceranica
The Museum is a valuable testimony to the intense activity of the mining community of Calceranica from 1800 to the second half of the 1900s.
Although the first occasional processes are documented in the Mandola valley – the stream that rises from the Vigolana massif and flows into Lake Caldonazzo – since 1600, the industrial exploitation of the deposit took place mainly between the end of the Second World War and 1964 by the Montecatini Company with the extraction of pyrite used in the manufacture of sulphuric acid.
The Museum exhibits objects and accessories of the individual equipment of the miners, from the oldest to the most recent, along with documents, photos, maps, drilling, aeration and transport machinery and anythingelse that was used for the processing of the extracted material.
A series of educational panels also present the geological structure and mineralization characteristics of the area.
A few steps from the town hall, in Piazza Graziadei, is the Monument to the Miner, sculpted in porphyry by the artist Mario Ricci. Inaugurated in 1991, it is 4.50 metres high and was built by a group of former miners and the Gruppo Culturale Miniera association.
