The road leading to Pozzo Sella changes colour before we even reach our destination. The earth turns red, then ochre, then almost white, as if the landscape were slowly revealing all the shades it has kept hidden underground for a century. Several times along the way, we feel like pulling over and getting out to take a photograph: the light changes, the ground changes, and every bend in the road seems to open onto a different picture.

Waiting for us at the entrance is Massimo Sanna, president of the Associazione Pozzo Sella. He needs no lengthy introduction: the way he opens his arms towards the surrounding landscape, the enthusiasm with which he immediately begins telling us where we are, is enough to understand that this place, for him, is not simply a piece of history to be preserved. It is something that belongs to him, and that he wants to share.

We enter a long, silent shed. The walls tell us more through their lack of plaster than through words: idle machinery, traces of rust, a floor that has absorbed decades of work.

“We are in the Monteponi mine”, Sanna begins, “essentially the historic metallurgical mine of the city of Iglesias, but also of the entire area”. His voice has the rhythm of someone who has told this story hundreds of times, without ever making it sound rehearsed.

Lead, zinc, galena, silver were extracted here. A centuries-old vocation, far older than the industrial landscape around us might suggest: “We have evidence of Phoenician and Roman sites that came here mainly to extract lead and silver”. Iglesias, then known as Villa di Chiesa, even had its own mint, where a coin called the Aquilino was struck. A fourteenth-century code, the Breve di Villa di Chiesa, already regulated mining activity at the time.

Then comes a leap through time: Spanish rule brings everything to a halt. Centuries later, a minister sent to survey the area by the Kingdom of Italy will be the one to bring the mine back to life.

“Quintino Sella was sent to Sardinia because the Kingdom of Italy needed raw materials”, Sanna explains. He found them here, at Monteponi. Back in Parliament, he realised that truly industrial-scale extraction required organisation, and the perpetual concession was granted to the Monteponi company, which could finally invest.

The place we are standing in now, dedicated to that very minister, bears his name: Pozzo Sella.

It was built by an engineer who arrived here at just twenty-three, Pellegrini, and who had to tackle an enormous problem: the deeper they dug, the more water the underground yielded, making extraction impossible. His solution was a steam-powered water drainage system, housed in this very shed and in the twin building we will see later: nine boilers on each side, a central tower, and two enormous connecting rods capable of descending seventy-five metres underground.

“Have you ever seen a syringe drawing water out of a basin?” Sanna asks, simplifying what would otherwise remain an abstract mechanism. That was exactly what it was: a mechanical motion repeated endlessly, day and night, to drain the tunnels and allow the men to keep digging.

It worked for a year and a half, but then the volume of water proved too great. Pellegrini made no excuses: “This is my failure, and I’m leaving”, he said, and resigned. His successor solved the problem with different machinery, and the steam system was dismantled for good, replaced by rooms with electric motors when electricity finally reached the site as well, thanks to a power station built by Monteponi itself.

The story descends, quite literally, along with the numbers. First came a room with electric pumps at minus fifteen, which here means almost eighty-five metres below sea level, given that the site stands at plus seventy. Then, twenty years later, a second room, deeper still. And finally, in 1970, the last one: the minus two hundred room, the largest of them all, capable of solving the water problem not only for Monteponi but for the entire Iglesias metallurgical basin, with all its tunnels finally drained.

Walking through the remaining rooms, you can still sense that immense scale: vast spaces designed to house equally enormous machines, where today the sound of your voice seems to disappear for a moment before returning as an echo.

Once past the central tower, we enter the twin shed, the one that once housed the other nine boilers.

It is darker than the first, with light filtering through just a few openings high above, and for a few seconds our eyes struggle to adjust. Then, slowly, our vision adapts, and we begin to make out what remains: the masonry bases where the boilers once stood, the marks on the floor that still trace their row, a space that today seems too large for the silence that fills it.

But Pozzo Sella was not just about pumps. Over the years, it became a small hub of self-sufficiency. A machine shop. A forge and small foundry. A carpentry workshop. “Whenever it needed to rebuild a part of a machine, it simply produced it in-house”, Sanna explains. The carpentry workshop shaped the wooden mould, the forges transformed it into metal, and the finished part returned to life in the machine that was waiting for it. Three different trades, under the same roof, keeping alive an organism that could not afford to stop.

He points out a spiral staircase built against a wall: made by the very same workers, using the same castings. Then there is the floor of the forge room, made of one hundred and fifty tonnes of zinc tiles, each measuring sixty by sixty centimetres and weighing sixty kilograms, laid directly on the ground without mortar because their own weight was enough to keep them in place. Walking across it today gives you a strange sense of solidity: as though the floor itself remembered how much work it had supported.

The site finally closed in 1990. The last pumps, those at minus two hundred, stopped in 1997. Then a wall gave way under the pressure of the water, which reclaimed the space it had contested for a century. Today, in that room, the water has once again become the sole master: anyone who looks inside still finds it there, perfectly still, as if it were waiting for someone.

It is in this silence that Pozzo Sella makes itself heard most clearly. Not an empty silence, but one filled with things that are simply waiting to be looked at closely: rust drawing new maps across the metal, light entering through the high windows and slicing the air into thin beams, the echo of our footsteps bouncing off walls designed to contain machines, not voices.

Sanna walks ahead of us with the confidence of someone who knows every corner, yet he often stops, as if each time he too were discovering something new. He points out a detail, waits for us to really look at it, then continues walking. He is in no hurry to finish the story. Rather, he seems to want to stretch out the time we spend inside.

There are places that tell their own story, and Pozzo Sella is one of them: all it takes is to stand still for a moment in the middle of an empty room, let your eyes adjust to the light, and the story comes to you without the need for words. The boilers that are no longer there can still be sensed by the marks they left on the floor. The connecting rods that once descended seventy-five metres can still be imagined by looking at the tower that housed them.

It is from these very same spaces, left empty after the mine closed, that a story larger than Pozzo Sella itself was born: the story of a man who shut himself inside a mine shaft for a year simply to make himself heard, and of an association that decided to transform the miners’ paths into a five-hundred-kilometre trail. We told that story in full in our article dedicated to the Santa Barbara Mining Trail: here, among these rooms, you can only begin to sense where it all started.

Before we leave, we ask Sanna what he would say to someone about to cross this threshold for the first time.

“Our places are sometimes places of silence and reflection”, he replies. “If you need to stop and watch a sunset, stop. If you feel like taking in the scent of a flower, do it.”

This is not advice for someone looking for information. It is advice for someone willing to let themselves be surprised. And that is precisely what makes Pozzo Sella different from a simple site to visit in a hurry, just to tick a box: here, time seems to stretch, the rooms appear larger than they really are, and every detail, from the spiral staircase to the zinc floor, asks to be looked at for longer than one would normally take elsewhere.

Pozzo Sella tells not only the story of lead, zinc and electric pumps. It tells us what can come from failure, if someone decides not to give up: an engineer who admits he was wrong and walks away, an association that chooses to rebuild what everyone else had allowed to fall into disrepair, a place that today welcomes those who want to enter not as tourists, but as witnesses.

It is not a place that can be fully experienced in a single visit. Each time someone walks through it, they tell its story in their own way, and that story in turn becomes part of the story Pozzo Sella continues to write. It is not a museum that preserves the past: it is a place that keeps growing every time someone chooses to stop and listen to it.

A place that you experience first through your feet, as Sanna puts it. But once you have walked through it, it stays with you in other ways too: in your eyes, in your memory, and in the desire to return.