Panorama Photo

A panorama which was "called" by the recent N.31579.

The history of the ancient mining site of Cave del Predil - Raibl - Rabelj is so long and entertaining that I wish somebody can take a bit of his time to read, perhaps with the help of some automatic translator, the long Wikipedia page
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_del_Predil
Let me add only what you do not find on Wikipedia. I reached Cave descending from the blessed spots of the Vrsic and the Moistrovka, and pedalling under heavy rain, which is quite common in this district. The arrival, in such weather conditions, at a grey mining site, gave me a strange sense od dejà-vu, which I later identified with an old descent, that time under a truly fierce and even dangerous thunderstorm, from a place bearing the self-explaining name Bozi Dar (present of the sky) to grey mining and industry places called Rittersgrün, Raschau, Schwarzenberg, Aue. Of that very old tour I retain also confused memories of rusty remains of barbed wire on top of the hills, or of a thorough control, on my passport, of the stamp that had been put on it somewhere at the entrance of the Sumava.
Twenty years later, here at the far corner between Italy, Slovenia and Austria, of course I do not experience anything of this. Yet Cave del Predil, in its declared lack of beauty, retains a strange fascination. The core of the mining work, which had been its very reason of existence, ceased, after nearly 30 centuries of activity, on 30-06-1991, although some subsidiary activity went on until 2009.
I was cooking a very abundant amount of pasta (which I needed, after a busy stage, much more that the pizza that the nearby Locanda del Minatore could offer) under a roof near the main entrance of the old mining site, now a museum, when I was neared by a man who was attending the evening walk of his dog. One of the around 400 people that still live in this place equipped to host 2000 workers. The question that I posed to him was the most obvious, perhaps the only one that I could figure out: "As you told me, you retired long time ago, and you are healthy and wealthy [he had been an administrator, not a worker]. What drives you to remain in this grey and rainy and half-abandoned place?"
"This is the place where I worked for the whole of my life, and all my memories are bound to it. Why should I want to move away?" was the answer that I received, while the noisy beat of the rain was persisting on the metal roof.