Sicily once sat at the center of a global supply chain most travelers never think about. Throughout the nineteenth century, the island’s interior fed the world’s appetite for sulfur, an element that powered new chemical industries and everyday products, from fertilizers and matches to soap and glass.
By some estimates, Sicily covered the lion’s share of global demand in the 1890s, a sign of how deeply the zolfare, as locals call the mines, shaped the island’s economy and society in those times. Today, that story is perhaps most significant because of the people who made the industry run, and the social changes their hard work, and often suffering, helped set in motion.
