Memories of the Gran Sasso. A series of videos in which the forgotten protagonists of a great work speak. Those men who worked for years in the bowels of the Gran Sasso. With their labor and their hands they created one of Italy’s greatest works, the longest double-bore tunnel in Europe. Their testimonies, charged with emotion, including the memory of those comrades who did not make it, gives us back a piece of our country’s history.
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Hundreds of committed men, years and years of work and numerous difficulties faced every day with courage and determination. The Gran Sasso Tunnel was a cyclopean work. It was attended by numerous Italian workers, technicians and engineers, especially from Abruzzo, who between 1968 and 1984 (with a stop from ’75 to ’82) worked to build one of the most important road works in central Italy: the first tunnel, which with its 10 kilometers, connects the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic sides. In 1975, work was suspended due to the economic crisis that hit Italy from the oil shock, and resumed in 1982. All the work was to be carried out by Cogefar, the Milanese road construction giant that later ended up in the Fiat orbit. On December 1, 1984, with an official ceremony presided over by then Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, and Minister Remo Gaspari, the real architect of the work, the tunnel in the direction of Teramo, between the Assergi and Colledara interchanges, was inaugurated, with one lane in each direction.
Testimonies and pride
Strada dei Parchi in the video “The Memories of the Gran Sasso” has collected the testimonies and stories of those who, in those 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, very different from today, worked at the Gran Sasso Tunnel construction site. Surveyor Augusto Neri, electrician Lorenzo Fantauzzi, worker Osvaldo Donatelli, and miner Elio Della Rovere describe the impassable roads before the tunnel, the difficulties encountered during excavation, the techniques that were at first rudimentary and then revolutionary for the time, the problem of water that flooded the excavation, and the great ingenuity put into the field to get around the enormous difficulties. The account of the witnesses, thanks in part to the unpublished documents collected, takes the viewer under the bowels of the Gran Sasso d’Italia and into the midst of the construction site that crossed the mountain for 10175 meters in length. From the words of Neri, Fantauzzi, Donatelli and Della Rovere, emerges the firm team spirit of a community and the strong Abruzzesepride for having contributed, together, to the realization of a unique work that marked the change of an entire region.
