Perni quarry

The next quarry is in a totally different landscape and social context – Adrano is a small town on the slopes of the volcano, inside Mount Etna National Park, and the rock which the Perni family have been extracting for over forty years is basalt – a black, extra-hard extrusive igneous rock.

Alessandro Canciullo – nephew of the founder Luigi Perni – takes us on a tour of the quarry, and we chat beneath the breaker while it carries on working. “For a while we used explosives, but it was so expensive, and harder to get licences, so we turned to Indeco for the primary breaking, after first removing the overburden above the basalt – and that other material is used as an aggregate base course for road-building”

“Using the chisel tool – continues Canciullo – the breaker is good for producing an output of 250 m3a day of primary winning; then, after replacing the chisel with a blunt tool, the next step is to break up the blocks. “We used to have only foreign brands of breaker – concludes Canciullo – until we met Signor Raco at the Bologna Trade fair and became part of the Indecommunity: at the time we purchased one UP 3500 and then in October 2006 we got ourselves an HP 3500. There is no doubt in our minds that they are great breakers, with an excellent quality-price ratio and efficient and timely after-sales service, though we haven’t needed any special intervention on their part”.