Barely a year after the end of the Second World War, a political agreement between Belgium and Italy brings more than 60,000 Italians to Belgian territory to work in the coal mines. “Italo-Belgian Protocol”, 1946: manpower for one nation, mining supplies for the other. Urbano Ciacci arrives in Belgium in 1954, begins to live in the town of Charleroi, south of Brussels. At the age of 21 he is one of the many Italian emigrants who work in the Bois du Cazier mine in Marcinelle. On July 28, 1956 Urbano returned to Italy for a short time. He wants to get married. He returns to his family and to his hometown, Cartoceto, in the Marche region, to celebrate a promise of love. "[...] They are all dead. These three words stand out on the first page of the Charleroi newspapers that came out early in the morning in an extraordinary edition, listed in mourning. They are all dead. The three words that people repeat in the streets in consternation sounded like three funereal tolls on the last act of Marcinelle's tragedy, at dawn on the seventeenth day of its inception» Corriere della Sera, 24 August 1956 So recited many newspapers the day after 8 August 1956, the day in which the Marcinelle mine becomes the scene of a disaster that causes the death of 262 people, including 136 Italian immigrants. So says that page of the Corriere della Sera that Urbano read through in Milan, on the carriage of the train returning to Belgium. Many of his companions died in the accident. Urbano today is the last, among the Italian miners of the Marcinelle mine, still alive. After the accident, the Italian State questioned the treaty, a controversial agreement whose evaluation, years later and in the light of the accident, becomes an opportunity to question the history and events which, for better or for worse , made Europe. Immigrant workers were only allowed to change jobs after 5 years in the mine, as stipulated in the protocol. Urbano retires from his job only in 1981, when he retires. The photographs observe and reconstruct small fragments of a personal story. An individual story that preserves in memories, experiences and inside preserved objects that of many other Italians whose life was directed, from a moment on, by a political agreement between nations. Urbano is a life saved by a promise of love and a fortuitous accident. It is also a life that bears witness to those of others, broken in half, of which names, memories, memorials remain. Even today Urbano remembers that «they are all dead» printed on the front page of a newspaper. He still remembers well the hope he felt in front of the entrance gate of the mine together with his wife, that his companions would be rescued. Even the landscape, like the eyes of a survivor today testifies and tells. In the black ground and in the urban transformations, in the industrial archaeologies, in the blackened facades of the houses. The coal cities of Belgium are the Pays Noir. Today, among the post-industrial urban agglomerations born around the abandoned mines, artificial hills emerge in the landscape, the Terrils - heaps of waste from the depths of the excavations, dark monuments that mark the pointed memory of a tragedy.