The caves of Capo Testa

The territory of Santa Teresa Gallura preserves evidence of the activity that was the fulcrum of the Roman economy in the area: the extraction of granite. An important economic resource of the island, the exercise of quarries has irretrievably marked the cliffs in the most majestic emergencies.
The proximity to the sea made it easy to board the columns that were made from them for transport to the port of Ostia.

From here, the compactness and chromatic elegance of Gallura granite enriched prestigious public buildings and sumptuous patrician villas of the imperial city.

The peninsula of Capo Testa, that of Municca, some emergencies in Punta Falcone and the islets of the Marmorata preserve the traces of the massive exercise of this activity, which has also given rise to stratified settlements for several centuries. In fact, the excavations carried out at Capo Testa have documented two phases of Roman attendance. The first dates back to the end of the Republican Age and the first imperial age, between the first century BC and the first century AD.

Along the coast, the signs of the mining activity and the processing of the columns that took shape under the expert hands of the stonemasons are clearly visible: the sites show, in excellent evidence, the systems of cutting and processing granite that have transformed the original profiles of granite formations into perfectly rectilinear walls. The cultivation system used was the “stepped” one; that is, the rock was gradually cut from top to bottom, until the emerging part was completely flattened.

The extraction took place through orthogonal cuts, made along the natural fracture planes proper to granite, which, when properly stressed, allow for clear detachment of the portions of rock. Clearly visible are the typical insertion holes for the wedges that have left their imprints along the edges and on the natural planes of detachment.

In fact, the detachment of large portions from the natural benches and the subsequent division of the blocks took place with the insertion of wedges into small cavities drilled, with an awl and a wedge, along the fracture lines. With the same tools, in the distance between one wedge and the other, a series of smaller holes were then drilled in line to define the breaking point. Finally, a violent blow of a bat on the median wedge caused the block to come off.

Gigantic monoliths detached from the bedrock, semi-finished columns, capitals and various architectural elements are visible in all the quarries. There are also numerous barrels of unfinished columns, others left out among the waste blocks because they were unsuccessful; in others, you can still see the finished work, but the artifacts were abandoned because they were broken during transport operations to the boarding points on the onerous ships to be sent to Rome.

The news of the use of the quarry even in the Middle Ages is confirmed by Vittorio Angius; the latter, drawing from historical sources, reports that in 1162 a certain Cioneto, a Pisan worker, by the will of Judge Costantino de Lacon, extracted from Capo Testa, from a quarry already active in Roman times, the columns for the construction of the Cathedral and the Baptistery of Pisa.

On the other hand, the attempt to start the extraction of granite in a gigantic trough that closes the access to Cala di L'Ea belongs to the present day. The results of the cut present on the stone, obtained with the system of iron wedges, often lead some to erroneously attribute this quarry point to Roman times. In reality, the diatribes and conflicts over the possession and cultivation of this unopened quarry belong to chronicles of the early 1900s, which also resulted in episodes of blood that put an end to the dispute.

Update

14/9/2023 - 17:04