1912. After the conquest of Lybia, the Italian government was in the need of an explosive factory away from the borders with France and Austria. Two Italian entrepreneurs – Leopoldo Parodi Delfino and Giovanni Bombrini – chose an abandoned sugar factory in Sacco Valley, an area south of Rome, as the perfect place to convert in an explosive factory. The open of B.P.D. and the arrival of many skilled workers from the northern part of Italy turned the area in a new “factory town”, then called Colleferro in 1935. During the WW2, Allied bombing hit the factory. Therefore 1500 people moved permanently in the shelters: 6 kilometers of tunnels under the town. Today arms factories in the valley are still operating and they naturally evolved in aerospace research, with the current leadership of Avio Spazio company. Santabarbara – from the patron Saint name of Colleferro and the name typically given to ammunition dumps – is research that combines archival materials with a personal and subjective vision, in order to mark and cross the boundaries of an Italian arms industry story. 

*** Captions:
1. Air-raid shelters that develop under the town for about 6 kilometers. Colleferro 2016
2. Old can of granulated hunting powder produced in the BPD plants of Colleferro, Rome
3. A part of the abandoned industrial area inside the city houses the Local Health Authority. Colleferro 2018
4. Church of Santa Barbara, Colleferro. Courtesy of G. Castaldo Collection
5. An altarpiece in the church of Santa Barbara in Colleferro. The work of the artist Marino Mazzacurati was donated by the widow Parodi Delfino for the recurrence of the accident in the explosives factory in 1938 in which there were 60 dead and over 1000 injured among managers, employees and workers.
6. View of the Santa Barbara district from Via degli Esplosivi, Colleferro 2018
7. Aerial photo of Colleferro with the factory area - covered by military secret - manually cropped from the original negative. Courtesy of the Military Geographic Institute
8. Matrix for the typographic printing of funeral memorial flyers (in the picture my grandmother's brother died during the Second World War)
9. Turret inside an abandoned military area in the Sacco Valley. Anagni 2016
10. Fake fresco with a flight of birds. Somewhere in the Sacco Valley, 2016
11. A white feather. Sacco Valley 2017
12. A detail of the interior of the Colleferro cement factory built close to the town in the early 19th century.
13. "City of Space" monument with the reproduction of the city symbol and the Vega space vector produced in the Avio Spazio factories. Colleferro 2017
14. The "Summer Triangle", a giant triangle in the sky composed of the three bright stars Vega, Altair and Deneb. NASA, ESA (Credit: A. Fujii - Public Domain)
15. Road sign riddled with shotgun shots. Sacco Valley 2016