Along the coast of Masua, in southwestern Sardinia, a tunnel mouth opens halfway up a limestone cliff facing the open sea; from a distance it looks almost like a balcony or a window, but it was once the most advanced loading terminal in Europe.
Porto Flavia was built between 1922 and 1924, and turned an inaccessible stretch of rock into a precision machine where ore flowed by gravity from mountain to ship. Its designer, engineer Cesare Vecelli, gave it the name of his young daughter, and the invention would change the way the region’s mines worked for decades.
