Specialty coffee in Ragusa

Ragusa sits on limestone soaked with bitumen, called pietra pece here - the black, polished stone went into stairs, floors and pipes. From the middle of the nineteenth century foreign companies leased some three hundred hectares under the town and shipped the asphalt out into the world, and in the years of Fascist autarky around two thousand people worked the extraction. In 1953 the Americans from Gulf Oil discovered there was oil under the asphalt layer as well, and ran a pipeline to the refinery at Augusta. The mines closed in 1968; today stalactites grow in the abandoned tunnels and bats spend the winter there.