CARBONIA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23269, 11 February 1939, Page 9 (Supplement)

CARBONIA

New Coal Town Built Up by Mussolini

CIGNOR MUSSOLINI has found a new field for his energetic genius in Sardinia. It is a coal field.

Italy has to import nearly all the coal for her manufactures, especially of iron and steel. In future she will find some of it in the mining district of Carbonia in Sardinia. It will be only a fraction of the coal she needs, but it is expected to amount to 1,500,000 tons a year, which is an output not to be despised, and the mining of it will have other advantages. The Duce, in inaugurating the new mining district of Carbonia spoke complacently of the immense wealth of Italy's self sufficiency in coal in 110 way inferior to foreign coal. This may have been a figure of speech suited to a festal occasion, but it is no figure of speech that owing largely to his own driving power the engineers have opened up paying seams of coal where few expected to find them, and that a township has been founded by the side of the mines already housing 12,000 people. The new coal town has been built in a year, and is a model of its kind with flower gardens between the houses of the miners, and with schools, church, post office, cinema, market, town hall and sports ground all complete. Carbonia is to be only a beginning. Near to it in the south-west corner of the island coal-washing plant and loading machinery are to be set up. so as to enable the coal to be shipped at once from Porto Antioco. Whether the enterprise will pay its way only the future can show. It depends on the quality of the coal. But the immediate profit is that of founding a new industry where few expected to discover it, and at the same time finding work in the future for 15,000 men. As an agriculturist Signor Mussolini has already established a name for

himself by planting wheat-fields in the reclaimed Pontine marshes south of Rome. Of the marshes, only a fewthousand acres remain out of the hundreds of thousands which before the Duce took them in hand were under water. The cultivated land now supports a population of 60,000 and can boast two towns.

Here Signor Mussolini did more than make two stalks of wheat grow where one grew before. In Sicily he has performed another miracle in mining coal where none was 'mined before.